The Puritan Vision of God # 3

The Puritan Vision of God # 3

God speaks, He speaks to you, He speaks to everyone. You must therefore prepare yourself to listen. You must train your mind that you may interpret His message. His message is recorded in the Scriptures, and that message you must read and understand and profit by. No priest or king shall read it for you. You must read it for yourself. Therefore you must be educated. It was the conception of the speaking God that built Harvard College and Yale College and all the other Puritan colleges of the world. Every one of our Puritan schools is built on the Puritan vision of the Eternal.

The God Who sits upon the throne is the sovereign of the world. His sway is absolute, His dominion has no end. He is the sovereign Judge. He holds man accountable for his deeds. To Him every soul must give account. "He will judge every one of you after His ways." "The soul that sinneth it shall die." "We must all stand before the judgment seat of Christ, and render an account of the deeds done in the body." "And I saw the dead, great and small, stand before God." That was the vision by which Hebrew thought was always haunted. And that was the vision which haunted the Puritan through all his days. "Draw the curtains and leave me alone," said old John Cotton on his death-bed, on the last day of his earthly life. "Draw the curtains and leave me alone. I would speak for a while to the King!"

The outcome of this vision, it is not necessary for us tonight to consider. You know what it was in apostolic history, and you know what it has been in the history of the Puritan world. From this vision there came a courage which has never been surpassed. The Puritans had in them the intrepid temper of Drake and Frobisher and the other sea kings of the sixteenth century, and did not hesitate to cut the cables and push their ships out upon seas whose bounds had not yet been determined. They were not afraid to trample down precedents when precedents were wrong, and burn up customs however ancient if those customs had proved destructive to the soul. There was no enemy however terrible whom they hesitated to fight, there was no suffering however fearful from which they shrank. As the historian Froude says in one of his essays, "They were the only men who in that great age stood up and fought," the only men who dared to strike at the Duke of Alva and resist the tyranny of Philip. When men told William the Silent that his cause was hopeless and tried to induce him to give up, his reply was, "When I took in hand to defend these oppressed Christians I made an alliance with the mightiest of all potentates, the God of Hosts, who is able to save us if He choose." "It is not with us," said one of the founders of New England, "as it is with those whom small things can discourage." The Puritan was heroism incarnate. And along with this splendid courage there was a magnificent hatred of shams and lies.

The Puritans hated mendacity, despised contradictions to duty and to truth. They saw that the throne was white. Because the throne of the Pope was black they hurled their thunderbolts against it. Religion in their day had become an elaborate and embroidered lie, and so they trampled it beneath their indignant feet. They took off the head of a king because he was a liar. And along with this hatred of hypocrisy and falsehood there was a fidelity to duty which never wavered and never failed. The Puritan conscience became a new factor in the progress of the world. The initial note of the new age was struck in Martin Luther's answer to the officials of the Roman church who demanded that he recant. "I can do naught else. Here stand I, God help me. Amen." A new age dawned when those words were spoken. That was the temper of the Puritan everywhere.

Listen to John Knox on his trial for treason saying, "I am demanded of conscience to speak the truth; and therefore the truth I speak, impugn it who so list." They have inscribed those words around the frieze of one of the rooms in the old house in Edinburgh in which the Scotch reformer lived. And along with this fidelity to duty there came a steadfast and unquenchable hope. Like the old Hebrew prophets the Puritans could never be beaten down. In the darkest night, amid the wildest discords, when the storm was at its highest they still kept saying to themselves, "Sometime, somewhere, somehow, His kingdom shall come, and His Name shall be glorious throughout the world."

Is this not the vision we need? We are living in confused and troubled times, when the winds are blowing a hurricane across the lands and the currents are sweeping us onward toward what we do not know. Sin still wears her scarlet and lifts her scepter, and evil in a thousand forms devastates the peoples of the earth. Many a fixed star has been dissipated to mist, and many a hope in these recent days has gone out. In current literature and in the conversation of the aged I detect now and then a tone of weariness and despondency,sometimes sinking into a sigh of hopelessness and despair. Many men have lost hope in their city and in our republic and in the world. Would that we might have a fresh vision of the throne! And if the prisoner on Patmos could speak to us tonight, he would say, "Look up! Look up!" But how difficult it is to look up. You remember John Bunyan's man with the rake. His eyes are fixed upon the ground, for he is raking up sticks and straws, while overhead hangs a golden crown which he never sees. It was hard for men in the sixteenth century to look up when they were raking sticks and straws; immeasurably more difficult is it now when men are raking together diamond dust and bars of gold.

~Charles E. Jefferson~

(continued with # 4)