Okay, who doesn’t love a cemetery? You may as well get used to them since you (or at least your body) will be spending quite a bit of time in one. Here’s a delightful tour of the Princeton Cemetery and some of its most famous residents.
Okay, this is the first time I’ve ever used this blog for ‘personal’ use but you’ve got to help me, help Eric, a member at Heritage. Eric has launched www.fellowtip.com and has barricaded himself in his garage on a live camera feed. He will remain there until he gets 500 people to sign up for his new service/tip ministry. You can go to his web site to find out more. Please…help me get Eric out of his garage. He’s been there for two days, has been on WJHL news this evening, and needs to ‘go home’ or, at least, inside his house. He now has 131 new users. For the sake of a ‘bathed’ earth, get Eric out of the garage.
Eight different words define sin in the Old Testament. They are: “ra, bad (Genesis 38:7); rasha, wickedness (Exodus 2:13); asham, guilt (Hosea 4:15); chata, sin (Exodus 20:20); avon, iniquity (I Samuel 3:13); shagag, err (Isaiah 28:7); taah, wander away (Ezekiel 48:11); pasha, rebel (I Kings 8:50). Sin is then, disobedience to God.
In the New Testament, 12 words describe sin. They are: Kakos, bad (Romans 13:3); poneros, evil (Matthew5:45); asebes, godless (Romans 1:18); enochos, guilt (Matthew 5:21); hamartia, sin (I Corinthians 6:18); adikia, unrighteousness (I Corinthians 6:9); anomos, lawlessness (I Timothy 2:9); parabates, transgression (Romans 5:14); agnoein, to be ignorant (Romans 1:13); planan, to go astray (I Corinthians 6:9); paraptomai, to fall away (Galatians 6:1); and hupocrites, hypocrite (I Timothy 4:2). Hence, sin is a deviation from God’s character and positive rebellion against God’s standard.
By a biblically theological definition then, sin is either the negative (for lack of…) or positive (for addition to…) in relationship to God, Who alone is gloriously righteous and the standard of uprightness for all creation, including mankind. It is the negative in that “all have fallen short of God’s glory” (Romans 3:23). It is the positive for God never said that Adam and Eve could not ‘touch’ the forbidden tree as Satan claimed (Genesis 3:3). Hence, on his deathbed, John Greshem Machen cabled a friend to say, “Thank God, for the active obedience of Christ.” To which I might add, “Thank God for the passive and active obedience of Christ.” It is that passive obedience that covers the positive action of our sinfulness, ie., self-righteousness, and that active obedience of God’s Son that fulfils God’s perfect law wherein we severely lack obedience and perfection.
It is difficult however, for people in our American culture to discuss the concept of sin because we are taught from birth that we are right and righteous. Sin’s worst danger is not that it exists but that it is so deceiving, Americans refuse to acknowledge its existence, especially within themselves. As such, sin is doubly-deadly. We live in a litigious society in which everything bad that happens to us is someone else’s fault. We are not sinners but diseased. We may be wrong but only because we were wrong. We are a nation of victims and excuses. We do not need a Savior but a counselor (Wells). Given the option between Voltaire and Pascal, (Enlightenment), Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, (Romanticism), we believe the best about ourselves and the worst about anyone, even God, who might tell us differently. This mind set so pervades the church that it is naturally impossible to make men see themselves as sinners. Hence, the Lord’s encouragement that His work is not by human might or power but by God’s Spirit (Zechariah 4:6). This is why, above all things, the church must bathe its existence in prayer, for, only God can do what only God can do, enlighten the mind, regenerate the soul, change the heart, move the will, etc.
This spiritual work of convincing men of sin is the Spirit’s work (John 16:8). But it is made difficult by the fact that modern Americans daily bathe in delusions of grandeur whose source is a self-esteem movement as old as Eden’s first lie, invigorated by an Enlightenment whose failure was epitomized in the French Revolution, the daughter of the American Revolution. Ever the idealists, Americans are nonetheless, heirs to Jefferson’s Enlightenment philosophies echoed in the Declaration of Independence, perhaps the antithesis of proper theology if ever any such single document existed. As such, we have and demand inalienable rights and any doctrine that diminishes our right to self-defined happiness is wrong, to be discarded of and its proponents banished from any position of influence or esteem.
Thus it is not the world who confesses their lack of sin, but the church itself. Or shall we say those tares among the wheat, that mixed multitude who dwell in the church for their own purposes. Nonetheless, men’s denial of what God declares is true, does not invalidate its reality, no matter the vehemence or outcry. “There is none righteous” (Romans 3:10) for “all have sinned” (Romans 3:23) and the wages of that “sin is death” (Romans 6:23).
Sin is “a failure to acknowledge God as God” and the cursing of His own Son upon the tree evidences God’s eternal displeasure with this failure. If, by God’s grace, this inherent, debilitating sinfulness is your confession, then rejoice toward God in thanksgiving for the amazing grace that saved a lost, blind wretch as yourself. For “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). And if you yet deny any sin at all, then be warned by John’s word that “8 If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us…10 If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us” (1 John 1:8 & 10). For it is not good men who go to heaven and bad men who go to hell but good men who rely on their own goodness who go to hell and bad men who acknowledge their badness to a holy God and accept His only remedy, the propitiation made by His Son, who gain entrance into the everlasting joy of God.
Of all that may be said concerning John Bunyan, it is undeniable that he was a man subject to, yet resilient, within his times. He was “a representative Puritan artisan who was also a writer of genius.”[4] Much of his life was experienced by unnumbered country boys who were born into poverty, assumed their father’s trade, endured the army in England’s Civil War and suffered under the multitude of religious changes that occurred within a very short period of time. Yet the difference between Bunyan and two thousand anonymous nonconformists buried in Bunhill Fields is simply Bunyan’s God and His sovereign providence.
In Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim’s Progress, Bunyan told a story as old as human history and with a universal appeal for its ideal among fallen men. His was the life of one solitary individual, standing against a Giant, facing great Despair, attempting to avoid Apollyon and pressing forward to a Celestial City. This is how his seventeenth century world perceived him and themselves. As for Bunyan, he humbly wrote of himself,
Indeed I have been as one sent to them from the dead; I went myself in chains to preach to them in chains; and carried that fire in my own conscience that I persuaded them to beware of. I can truly say, and that without dissembling, that when I have been to preach, I have gone full of guilt and terror even to the pulpit door, and there it hath been taken off, and I have been at liberty in my mind until I have done my work, and then immediately, even before I could get down the pulpit stairs, I have been as bad as I was before; yet God carried me on, but surely with a strong hand, for neither guilt nor hell could take me off my work.[5]
[1] Hill, A Turbulent….People, p. 366.
[2] Offor, Works of Bunyan, 1:1xxviii
[3] Ibid., 1:1xxviii
[4] Hill, A Turbulent…People, p. 368.
[5] Bunyan, Grace Abounding, pp. 152-153.
In 1661 and again between 1668-1672, Bunyan’s twelve year incarceration met with recurring interruptions, often lasting from only hours to a few weeks, but offering him sufficient time to visit his family and preach in the surrounding area. Even the jail afforded him captive audiences of up to fifty men with whom Bunyan regularly shared the gospel and to whom He preached on Sundays. In Bunyan’s day, inmates were entirely dependent on the kindness of family and friends for essentials. Visitors kept him supplied with books, among them, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and his Bible. In addition, Bunyan took up the Elstow industry of lace-making in an effort to financially support his family.
Bunyan was released from prison in March of 1672 under Charles II’s Declaration of Indulgence to Nonconformists, an act only proffered to nonconformists so that Charles could disguise the same kindness toward Roman Catholics. Strangely, it was John Owen, the Independent minister of Leadenhall Street in London who had influenced the Bishop of Lincoln, Thomas Barlow, to secure Bunyan’s freedom. On the twelfth day of the first month of that same year, the Bedford congregation had appointed Bunyan as their pastor. In May of the same year, Bunyan received a royal license to preach. He was then officially installed as the Pastor of the same Bedford church which had nurtured him in spiritual infancy and began his long and illustrious career as the Bedford pastor. “He had been the first to suffer under Charles II and was the last to be released.”[1] While in prison, the Bedford congregation had lost their church building to the royally approved Episcopalian church. Thus, Bunyan’s faithful flock gathered in a barn which regularly held great crowds of people who longed to hear the tinker preach, many, as far away as London.
His imprisonment and the resulting books created a popular atmosphere for Bedford’s pastor and his fame continued to grow with each of the passing three years until 1675. Then, as before, the tides of England’s religious sea swept over nonAnglicans in an effort to drown out any nonconformity. A warrant was issued for Bunyan’s arrest in March of 1676 and he was once again imprisoned for six months, this time in a one-room jail on the bridge over the River Ouse. It was most probably during this time frame that Bunyan wrote, The Pilgrim’s Progress, originally published in 1678. In its first decade, the book sold more than 100,000 copies. Since its original publication, the book has never since been out of print, enjoying an increasing popularity that has grown to more than 1,500 editions in over two hundred languages. The Pilgrim’s Progress alone launched Bunyan’s fame as the most well-read, most well-known nonconformist minister in all of the British Empire.
Charles II’s restoration as England’s monarch was accompanied with the immediate persecutions of nonconformists throughout the British Empire. On November 12, 1660, Bunyan stood before the local magistrate at Lower Samsell in South Bedfordshire, accused of leading a nonconformist religious gathering. His plan had been to preach out of doors that very day. Warned of an imminent arrest, Bunyan nevertheless kept the appointment and was summarily arrested. “The local magistrate offered him a way out: if he would go home and not preach anymore, he would not be prosecuted.”[1] Because he would not promise to refrain from preaching, he was imprisoned in the county jail in January of 1661. He wrote,
At the sessions after I was indicted for an upholder and maintainer of unlawful assemblies and conventicles, and for not conforming to the national worship of the church of England; and after some conference there with the justices, they taking my plain dealing with them for a confession, as they termed it, of the indictment, did sentence me to a perpetual banishment, because I refused to conform. So being again delivered up to the jailer’s hands, I was had home to prison, and there have lain now complete twelve years, waiting to see what God would suffer these men to do with me.[2]
Upon hearing the news of her husband’s incarceration, Elizabeth endured premature labor which ended in the newborn’s death.
Initially sentenced to three months in prison, Bunyan was never formally charged.[3] He was actually found guilty of the almost forgotten Conventicle Act of 1593, of “perniciously abstaining from coming to church to hear divine service, and for being a common upholder of several unlawful meetings and conventicles to the great disturbance and distraction of the good subjects of this kingdom.”[4] The magistrate decided that Bunyan should be held for the full three months authorized by the Conventicle Act, after which, if then he should not agree to quit preaching, he should be banished the realm. Thus began the most well-known and industrious twelve-year period of Bunyan’s life; a time which would create world-wide and enduring fame for the tinker from Bedford.
John Bunyan, the tinker, joined John Gifford’s church in 1655 and moved his wife and four children to Bedford. He was baptized in the River Great Ouse. Not long after his baptism, John Burton replaced Bunyan’s ‘Interpreter’ as Bedford’s pastor and Bunyan was called upon to supply for the often ill Burton. However, Bunyan did not only preach in the Bedford church but anywhere anyone would listen to him exclaim the good grace of the God Who had gloriously saved him. In this capacity he came into contact with those not of his own persuasion.
For the five years of 1655-1660, Bunyan found himself embroiled in controversy with Quakers who vied for the religious affections of the tradesmen in Bedford proper and the surrounding county of Bedfordshire. Quakers followed the “inner light,” which, to some, disparaged the written word of God. As such, Bunyan’s encounters with Quakers were primarily intended to reinforce the sufficiency of God’s Word, and not to demean Quakers. His first two books, Some Gospel Truths Opened (1656) and A Vindication of Some Gospel Truths Opened (1657) were both written during a time in which Bunyan defended Puritan theology both in print and through public discourse.
Bunyan’s disposition to argumentation may have been somewhat hereditary. Under Mary I’s reign, Bunyan’s great-grandfather “was summoned before the Privy Council for some unspecified offense.”[1] His grandfather “was in trouble with the ecclesiastical officials in 1617 for calling the churchwardens liars.”[2] Nevertheless, each of Bunyan’s encounters with controversy seemed to be more reactive and impressed upon him, than those of a trouble-maker who sought altercation. As a man of his times, he responded to the British kingdom’s vacillating affections with faithfulness to His God and His Word. It was in this regard, even to the place of imprisonment, that Bunyan’s open debates, public preaching and books brought him both fame and infamy as a leader of sectaries. It was most certainly a distinction that attracted unwanted attention.
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