Reading Biographies: Spurgeon

I am, supposedly, reading Arnold Dallimore’s Spurgeon along with Tim Challies and others. Last week was the first week reading this biography and the assignment was to read the first two chapters.

I read them on schedule—honest—but I couldn’t find time to post on what I read until now. What’s more, I wasn’t sure what I should be putting up in response to each week’s reading. Simply summarizing chapters in a biography seemed pointless. So here’s my plan: Each week I’ll choose something I think is interesting from that  week’s reading, quote it for you, and make a few comments.

These first two chapters tell us about Charles Spurgeon’s childhood and his conversion. Spurgeon, we’re told, experienced many years of “long and bitter conviction of sin” before he was converted at age 15.

[T]hroughout several boyhood years, he was constantly conscious of the universal requirements of God’s law. “Wherever I went,” he says, “it had a demand upon my thoughts, upon my words, upon my rising, upon my resting.” And amidst his struggles to overcome that dreadful realization he came face to face with its kindred truth, the spirituality of the law. Although he had never committed the sins of the flesh he felt themselves guilty of them in the spirit, and he cried out, “What hope had I of eluding, such a law as this, which every way surrounded me with an atmosphere from which I could not possibly escape.”

Frequently, upon awakening after a troubled night, he took up such books as Alliene’s Admonition to Unconverted Sinners and Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted. But the works that had been so helpful to others only enforced what he already knew—that he was lost and needed to be saved. They left him with a bitter longing to know how the great salvation was to be received, and he remained seeking and suffering.

These years of terrible conviction—almost to the point of despair—prepared him to be truly converted when he finally heard a simple sermon that proclaimed the gospel.

Since reading this account, I’ve been thinking of children and conviction of sin. I know that I experienced  a rather deep conviction before I responded to the gospel call when I was a little girl. Not for years, like Charles Spurgeon; after all, I was only five years old. But I knew that I was in big trouble with God and there was nothing I could do to make things better. And it wasn’t just a passing thought, but something I stewed over enough that I remember it. It wasn’t pleasant, but it was a necessary step to finding the Saviour.

When my own children were very young, I think I did a good job of presenting God as loving father to them, but that I was too cautious in presenting him as judge. My natural inclination was to protect them from the difficult time I’d experienced as a little girl, fretting over my sin and my “God problem.” It was foolish of me to think this way, especially since I also knew from my own past the importance of conviction of sin as a necessary step toward knowing God as saviour. God loves you isn’t the whole story, and even young kids need to know the whole story.

Unfortunately, Charles Spurgeon was troubled for far too long before someone told him that he would be saved if he trusted Christ. He’d been missing part of the story, too, and he’d suffered for it. Still, he says, “it was, no doubt, all wisely ordered….” And Dallimore tells us that

the sufferering through which he had passed … had a lasting effect upon him. A recognition of the awful evil of sin was deeply ingraned upon his mind and made him loathe iniquity and love all that was holy. The failure of preachers he had heard to present the gospel, and to do so in a plain, direct manner, caused him throughout his whole ministry to tell sinners in every sermon and in a most forthright and understandable way how to be saved.

So yes, it was difficult for him—and for much of it, he was just a young boy—but at the same time it was all wisely ordered to produce good fruit.

Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy 22

What do Christians mean when they say the Bible is inerrant? The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy tells us what leading inerrantist mean by inerrancy. I’ll be posting a section of this statement each week until I’ve posted the whole thing.

After a preface and a short statement, the Chicago Statement contains the Articles of Affirmation and Denial. (You can read previously posted sections of this statement in by clicking here.) The last section is the Exposition, which “gives an account of the outline of doctrine from which our summary statement and articles are drawn.” Below is the first section of this summary statement.

---

Exposition

Our understanding of the doctrine of inerrancy must be set in the context of the broader teachings of the Scripture concerning itself. This exposition gives an account of the outline of doctrine from which our summary statement and articles are drawn.

Creation, Revelation and Inspiration

The Triune God, who formed all things by his creative utterances and governs all things by His Word of decree, made mankind in His own image for a life of communion with Himself, on the model of the eternal fellowship of loving communication within the Godhead. As God’s image-bearer, man was to hear God’s Word addressed to him and to respond in the joy of adoring obedience. Over and above God’s self-disclosure in the created order and the sequence of events within it, human beings from Adam on have received verbal messages from Him, either directly, as stated in Scripture, or indirectly in the form of part or all of Scripture itself.

When Adam fell, the Creator did not abandon mankind to final judgment but promised salvation and began to reveal Himself as Redeemer in a sequence of historical events centering on Abraham’s family and culminating in the life, death, resurrection, present heavenly ministry, and promised return of Jesus Christ. Within this frame God has from time to time spoken specific words of judgment and mercy, promise and command, to sinful human beings so drawing them into a covenant relation of mutual commitment between Him and them in which He blesses them with gifts of grace and they bless Him in responsive adoration. Moses, whom God used as mediator to carry His words to His people at the time of the Exodus, stands at the head of a long line of prophets in whose mouths and writings God put His words for delivery to Israel. God’s purpose in this succession of messages was to maintain His covenant by causing His people to know His Name—that is, His nature—and His will both of precept and purpose in the present and for the future. This line of prophetic spokesmen from God came to completion in Jesus Christ, God’s incarnate Word, who was Himself a prophet—more than a prophet, but not less—and in the apostles and prophets of the first Christian generation. When God’s final and climactic message, His word to the world concerning Jesus Christ, had been spoken and elucidated by those in the apostolic circle, the sequence of revealed messages ceased. Henceforth the Church was to live and know God by what He had already said, and said for all time.

At Sinai God wrote the terms of His covenant on tables of stone, as His enduring witness and for lasting accessibility, and throughout the period of prophetic and apostolic revelation He prompted men to write the messages given to and through them, along with celebratory records of His dealings with His people, plus moral reflections on covenant life and forms of praise and prayer for covenant mercy. The theological reality of inspiration in the producing of Biblical documents corresponds to that of spoken prophecies: although the human writers’ personalities were expressed in what they wrote, the words were divinely constituted. Thus, what Scripture says, God says; its authority is His authority, for He is its ultimate Author, having given it through the minds and words of chosen and prepared men who in freedom and faithfulness “spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (1 Pet. 1:21). Holy Scripture must be acknowledged as the Word of God by virtue of its divine origin.

To the Immortal Memory of the Halibut

On Which I Dined This Day

WHERE hast thou floated, in what seas pursued
Thy pastime? when wast thou an egg new-spawn’d,
Lost in th’ immensity of ocean’s waste?
Roar as they might, the overbearing winds
That rock’d the deep, thy cradle, thou wast safe—
And in thy minikin and embryo state,
Attach’d to the firm leaf of some salt weed,
Didst outlive tempests, such as wrung and rack’d
The joints of many a stout and gallant bark,
And whelm’d them in the unexplor’d abyss.
Indebted to no magnet and no chart,
Nor under guidance of the polar fire,
Thou wast a voyager on many coasts,
Grazing at large in meadows submarine,
Where flat Batavia just emerging peeps
Above the brine,—where Caledonia’s rocks
Beat back the surge,—and where Hibernia shoots
Her wondrous causeway far into the main.
—Wherever thou hast fed, thou little thought’st,
And I not more, that I should feed on thee.
Peace therefore, and good health, and much good fish,
To him who sent thee! and success, as oft
As it descends into the billowy gulph,
To the same drag that caught thee!—Fare thee well!
Thy lot thy brethern of the slimy fin
Would envy, could they know that thou wast doom’d
To feed a bard, and to be prais’d in verse.   

—William Cowper

I wonder if his halibut was beer batter deep fat fried?