http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/14740467/judge-others-as-you-want-to-be-judged
“Judge not.” Few words of Jesus are more familiar, even to non-Christians. And when understood, few are more devastating.
Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you. (Matthew 7:1–2)
In the face of others’ aggravations and sins — their thoughtless comments and annoying tones, their insensitive laughter and failures to follow through — how natural it feels to convict them in the court of our imagination. How gratifying to hear our inner prosecutor give their words or actions the worst spin, and then to close the case before the defense can even speak.
And how easy to forget that one day, the judgments we laid on others will be laid on us; the measures we used to assess others will be used to assess us. One day, we will enter the court of our imagination — and this time not as judge, but as defendant.
How many emails would be abandoned and text messages unsent, how many thoughts would be discarded and words unsaid, how many conversations would be redirected and posts unread, if only we heard our Savior say, with eternal sobriety in his voice, “Judge not”?
Wrong Judgment
Of course, “judge not” does not mean what some would like it to mean. Matthew 7:1 is the life verse of many who simply would like to live in sin undisturbed. Rarely do they read the rest of the chapter, where Jesus warns against “dogs,” “pigs,” and “false prophets” — and expects us to judge who they are (Matthew 7:6, 15–20). Rarer still do they read Matthew 7 alongside John 7, where Jesus commands, “Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment” (John 7:24).
Critical thinking, discernment, and “right judgment” belong to every mature disciple of Christ. But there is another kind of judgment to which Jesus says, “Judge not” — a kind produced in the factory of our unredeemed flesh, marked by a tendency to (1) indulge hypocrisy and (2) withhold mercy.
Hypocritical Judgment
“Let me take the speck out of your eye” (Matthew 7:4). Our words of judgment, whether spoken or merely thought, may seem unobjectionable, perhaps even kind. We really do notice a speck in another’s eye — some small pattern of sin or folly that our brother has failed to see. And don’t we all appreciate the friend who points out the spinach in our teeth or the shirt tag climbing our neck?
But wait: “There is the log in your own eye” (Matthew 7:4). The spinach-noticer has ketchup smeared across his cheeks; the tag-discerner forgot to put his pants on; the speck-remover has a birch tree jutting from his left eye. In other words, “You hypocrite” (Matthew 7:5).
The faults and annoyances of others — that is, their specks — have a way of taking our eye from the mirror and putting it over a magnifying glass. In the moment of offense, how easily many of us assume, without prayer and with scarcely three seconds’ worth of thought, that we are only the observers of specks and logs, and not also the bearers of them. We hear her retort without remembering our own exasperating comment; we bristle at his third reminder while forgetting our own failure to communicate well. We quickly play the role of prosecutor, but refuse to cross-examine ourselves.
Those who “judge with right judgment” do not pass by others’ specks without comment, but they spend some time searching their own eyes before poking another’s. “First take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye” (Matthew 7:5).
Merciless Judgment
Hypocrisy, of course, is never the friend of mercy. When we spend more time noticing others’ sins than our own, we struggle to wear the “spirit of gentleness” that Paul speaks of (Galatians 6:1). Numb to our own desperate need for mercy, our judgments burn without soothing, cut without healing.
“We have a way of swelling others’ specks into logs, and of shrinking our own logs into specks.”
“With the measure you use it will be measured to you,” Jesus warns (Matthew 7:2). But in the grip of wrong judgment, we often use one measure for others, and another for ourselves. A spouse’s sharp words are plain cruelty, full stop. But our own sharp words are warranted by the circumstances — or at least excused by tiredness, stress, hunger, or provocation. We have a way of swelling others’ specks into logs, and of shrinking our own logs into specks.
John Stott writes, “The command to judge not is not a requirement to be blind, but rather a plea to be generous” (The Message of the Sermon on the Mount, 177) — or as the apostle James puts it, to show mercy (James 2:13). But generous, merciful judgment takes energy and time. It requires an eye for complexity, a willingness to give the benefit of the doubt, a self-distrusting posture and a prayerful heart. Far easier to madly swing the gavel.
Two Great Judgments
How, then, do we shut the mouth of our hypocritical judgments? How do we lay down our merciless measures and “judge not,” especially when faced with real offenses? We begin where Jesus begins in this passage and remember that we are not first the judge, but the judged. And to that end, we live today in light of two great judgment days, one past and one future.
Judgment Past
Every Christian knows something of the experience Paul describes in Romans 3:19:
Now we know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God.
At one point or another, we stood, mouth stopped, before the judgment seat of God. Every excuse was stripped away; every defense failed. We faced the holy, holy, holy God, and could plead only guilty.
“Mercy met us at the judgment seat of God, bidding us to go and speak a better word than judgment.”
Jesus assumes as much earlier in the Sermon on the Mount. How else would we be “poor in spirit” and “meek”? How else would we “mourn” and “hunger and thirst for righteousness” (Matthew 5:3–6)? We remember what it feels like to be weighed and found wanting. We can’t help but remember. As Sinclair Ferguson writes, “To be silenced before the throne of God is an unforgettable experience! It shows every time we speak with and to others” (The Christian Life, 41).
But of course, we were not only silenced before the throne of God; we were also forgiven there. God’s burning coal of grace touched our lips, saying, “Your guilt is taken away, and your sin atoned for” (Isaiah 6:7). Mercy met us at the judgment seat of God, bidding us to go and speak a better word than judgment.
When we remember judgment past, unrighteous judgments no longer rest upon our lips so easily. The pardoned criminal cannot condemn his fellows as he did before. Mercy has touched him — and mercy cannot help but beget mercy.
Judgment Coming
Jesus then lifts our gaze to the judgment yet to come:
Judge not, that you be not judged. With the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you. (Matthew 7:1–2)
The day is coming soon when “we will all stand before the judgment seat of God” (Romans 14:10) — great and small, rich and poor, well-known and unknown. And what will happen when we stand there? The rubric we raised against others will be raised against us.
Those who have judged without mercy, consistently and unrepentantly, will face “judgment . . . without mercy” (James 2:13). Their merciless judgments will become evidence that they never received, never treasured, the mercy of God in Christ, and so they will reap the same judgments they sowed.
Yet those who have learned, by grace and through much repentance, to take up a measure of mercy will be, amazingly, “not judged” (Matthew 7:1). Not judged on judgment day! Only the grace of a cross-bearing Christ could craft such a wondrous thought.
Those who revel in that future day now cannot help but think and speak differently now. They do not throw away discernment or critical thinking; they strive, with God’s help, to “judge with right judgment” (John 7:24). But even when they must confront, rebuke, or remove a speck from another’s eye, they do so as those who once were headed toward judgment, but now are wrapped with eternal, unchangeable mercy.
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What Is It Like to ‘Know Christ’?
Do you remember your first conscious “favorite song” as a child? Maybe it was a single, or an album, or a specific artist.
I remember hearing a particular song on the radio as a four- or five-year-old and saying out loud to my parents, “That’s my favorite song.”
Now, I realize I’m one of the older people in the room. So, I’ll ask, but I don’t expect many to raise a hand. Does anyone know the name Larnelle Harris?
Hands down, gospel singer Larnelle Harris was my first favorite singer. In January of 1985, Larnelle released an album called “I’ve Just Seen Jesus,” and the first song on the cassette was called “How Excellent Is Thy Name.” I loved that song.
The reason I mention Larnelle is that two years later, in 1987, he released another album, and tucked away fifth on the cassette was a song based on Philippians 3 called “I Want to Know Christ.” Still today, this song moves me deeply. Something about this song captured my six-year-old heart. I could tell its subject matter was unsurpassed. A song about “knowing Christ” felt so much bigger than your standard-fare Christian music of the 80s — or any decade. It went so clearly to the very heart of what God made us for.
I’ll read you the chorus, and you can hear our text this morning, as well as the “pressing on” we’ll look at next week in verses 12–14:
I want to know ChristI keep Him before meI lift up my eyesI drink in His gloryI press toward the goalHis goodness unfoldsMarch on, O my soulI want to knowI want to know Christ
Deep, Personal Knowing
At the end of the sermon last Sunday, Jonathan set the table so well for us for today. In fact, I hope this message will simply flesh out what he said near the end — that Philippians 3 doesn’t just want us to be right with God (which is penultimate) but to know Jesus. Knowing Christ is the final goal, the ultimate goal; it’s what makes heaven to be heaven:
Jesus is not just the means to get you what you want, but Jesus also becomes what you want. Jesus is means and end. To know Jesus is of surpassing worth. That is what is most valuable — to know “Christ Jesus my Lord.” . . . This is a deep, personal knowing. It’s real experience in real relationship. Intimacy.
I see three pieces here that map onto what we might call a (kind of) past aspect in verse 9, and a present aspect in verse 10, and a future aspect in verse 11.
So, here’s how we’ll proceed this morning: we’ll start by rehearsing what we saw last week in verse 9 (the penultimate), then jump to verse 11 and the future, and then come back to verse 10 and linger over what it means to “know Christ,” even now in this life, in the present. I hope to shoot as straight as I can about what it means to know Christ, and what that experience is like, and how we go about seeking to know him and enjoy him in our everyday Christian lives.
So, we start with the penultimate in verse 9.
1. We are fully accepted by God in Jesus.
I’m not sure we used the word “justification” in the last two weeks, but this is the reality we’ve been talking about. Verse 3 mentions “boasting in Christ Jesus” and “putting no confidence in the flesh.” This is justification talk. It raises the question, What is the grounds of your right-standing with God, your acceptance before God? How can an unrighteous sinner get right, and stay right, with the righteous, holy God?
Justification is God’s declaration over sinners like us, “You are righteous in my sight. I declare you to be in the right with me, fully accepted in my presence.” How? Not because of anything we’ve done to deserve God’s favor. But rather, because of what Jesus has done to win for us God’s favor and the verdict “Righteous!”
Start back in verse 7, and get the flow of thought into verse 9:
Whatever gain I had [and remember his amazing list of Jewish gains in verses 5–6], I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith.
Three pieces here help us get clarity on this justification by faith alone.
First, what is not the grounds of Paul’s justification, and ours, before God: our own merit. He says, “not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law.” The problem is not the law; it is holy, righteous, and good. The problem is us. We are sinners through and through. We are not holy, righteous, and good, and so even our very best efforts at obeying God’s holy, righteous, and good law cannot win his righteous favor and get us right with him.
Second, then, what is the grounds of our justification? Answer: having the righteousness that “comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith.” Faith in whom? Faith in Christ. Righteousness from whom? Righteousness from God, through our believing in Jesus.
But still, one piece is missing, and it’s easy to overlook, at the beginning of verse 9: “found in him.” This is relational language, and it’s part of an interaction or an exchange. Paul has been talking about gaining Christ, getting Christ, and now he talks about Christ getting him, his being found in Christ. It’s almost like, “I am my beloved’s, and he is mine,” from the Song of Solomon. I get Christ because he got me.
Which means the ground of our justification is Christ alone, not our doing. And the instrument that connects us to Jesus is faith alone, again not our doing. And the context or the location of that faith is our being “found in him,” our being united to him, by the Spirit, through faith.
So, justification, in verse 9, is our being fully accepted by God in Christ. United to Jesus by faith, his righteousness is ours, and the Father’s full acceptance of him is ours.
Brothers and sisters, to know, really know, the grace of justification by faith alone will make you want to stand on your head for joy — and remember, verse 9 is penultimate. Justification is not the end. It’s not the final goal or reality. Justification, amazing as it is, is the means — the means to knowing the one in whom we are justified.
So, number one, we are fully accepted by God in Jesus. Now bounce ahead to verse 11 and the ultimate goal.
2. One day we will fully know Jesus and be satisfied in him forever.
That is, we will live forever, together, in ever-increasing bliss, in the unobstructed presence of and ever-deepening relationship with Jesus.
“Justification, amazing as it is, is the means to knowing the one in whom we are justified.”
We call this “glorification.” One day soon, when we see Jesus — the risen, glorified God-man — face-to-face, we too, like him, will be glorified. In that day, says verse 21, Jesus “will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body.”
Let’s read verse 10 to verse 11. As we’ve seen, Paul is celebrating being united to Christ by faith and declared righteous in him:
. . . that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.
So, verse 11 speaks to a future reality: our attaining, our reaching, our arriving at, our coming to the resurrection from the dead. Just like Jesus rose again bodily to a new indestructible, risen, glorified body — the same temporal earthly body that went into the grave, then raised and transformed into an eternal heavenly body — so we too who are in Christ will one day rise again bodily to glorified, transfigured resurrection bodies.
And in these perfected, indestructible bodies, we will live eternally with Jesus, experiencing to the full the life God made us to live. We will have eternal life, which won’t only mean living in the same new world as the risen Christ, but it will mean knowing him. Union with him by faith now leads to communion with him forever. This, at its heart, is what eternal life is, like Jesus said in John 17:3:
This is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.
Note two stunning moves in this statement: (1) Jesus puts knowing God at the heart of eternal life; then (2) he puts himself at the center of knowing God: “and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”
Remember the new-covenant prophecy that we saw in Hebrews 8, from Jeremiah 31, that “they shall all know me”? The coming of Jesus, God himself taking human flesh, dying for us, and rising again as the glorified God-man forever, is how God draws near to us that we might know him — “the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Corinthians 4:6).
So, with Christ’s perfect work finished, justification by faith alone is the ground beneath our feet; and seeing him face-to-face is ahead of us, when we will be in the same space with the God-man — no distance, no obstructions, no remoteness, no more knowing in part but then knowing in full. But what about in the meantime? What about now, between our justification and glorification?
3. We know Jesus even now and want to know him more.
We’ve seen penultimate and ultimate, and so finally we come to “deep, personal knowing, real experience in real relationship,” even in this life. Verse 10:
. . . that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death . . .
What does it mean to know Jesus — not just know about him but know him, right now, the living Christ on the throne of heaven? Do you know him?
What does it mean to know Jesus, when, unlike his disciples, you’ve never seen him with your own eyes, or touched him with your own hands, or heard his human voice with your own ears? How do you know a person who is at present physically inaccessible? How can you know him?
One thing to make clear about Paul’s expressed desire “to know him” is that Paul is pressing way beyond minimal saving knowledge to maximal satisfying knowing. He’s not asking, What’s the least I need to know to be saved? Rather, he’s talking about maximally knowing and enjoying a real, living, breathing person, who has made himself knowable both as God and as man. This is maximal personal-knowing, not minimal information-knowing.
Struggle as we might to capture in words what it means to know Jesus, we all know experientially as persons what it’s like to know another living person. You don’t know a person simply by being in the same room. Two people can sit in silence in the doctor’s office waiting room and not know each other at all. Or two people thousands of miles away can know each other profoundly through the sequenced exchange of words. Shared space is not the essence of how we come to know each other, but interaction. Communication. Self-revelation. Exchanging words is typically the main channel through which persons know each other.
Our words reveal the unseen inner person, and so words heard and responded to in kind enable us to dialogue and interact and so know each other in and through the exchange. We come to know a person by listening to him and then, in the rhythms of relational interaction, speaking back to him with questions or our own self-revelation.
And don’t miss this: getting to know a person well also involves other people. You see more, and hear more, and know a person more by enjoying him with others. Other people draw out previously unknown aspects of the person. Also knowing someone deepens as you experience life with him, and especially life’s ups and downs, both triumphs and defeats.
As we get to know a living person, it often happens first in big chunks and then through endless refinements over time. You never exhaust knowing a living person. Yet over time we can genuinely say that we come to know a person’s heart, their essence, who they really are. So, when someone else talks about a person you know, “Yes, that’s him.” Or you might say, “No, I know him, and that doesn’t sound like him.”
And of course, Jesus is no ordinary person, so there’s a special note to strike here: vital to our knowing him, and coming to know him more, is something unique compared to every mere human person we know. Those whom Jesus knows, he puts in them his own Spirit. If you are in Christ, the Holy Spirit dwells in you, and (as we’ve seen in Philippians 2:13 and 3:3) he is “the Spirit of Christ” (1:19). We hear Jesus’s voice in his word by the Spirit, and we pray to him in the Spirit, and we come together as his people through the Spirit. Which leads to Paul’s next phrase in verse 10.
Resurrection Power
What does it mean, then, to “know him and the power of his resurrection”? Jesus not only died in our place to forgive our sins; he rose again, and he is alive. He is alive to know, right now, as a living person, as the God-man seated on heaven’s throne, because of the power of the resurrection. So, to know the living Christ is to know him in the power of his resurrection.
But it also means to experience his resurrection power in our own person by his Spirit and be changed by him. It means to interact with him and so be transformed by him.
In knowing Christ, in being united to him and communing with him, his resurrection power doesn’t leave us unchanged. We are sanctified. We become more like him.
Which means in coming to know Christ better, in his holiness and grace, we also come to know ourselves better in our sin and need. Knowing Jesus has major life entailments. Knowing Jesus will change us. In fact, knowing Jesus is the engine of true Christian change. But — get this straight — we don’t change in order to know him; we know him and his resurrection power and so begin to change.
Knowing Christ transforms the fight against sin and our striving to be like him by putting it in the right perspective. When you know Christ and want to know him more, reading the Bible and meditating on Scripture is not a chore to be completed but a means of God’s grace in the pursuit of knowing Jesus more. Prayer is not a box to check, but speaking back to the one we know, in the power of his Spirit, having heard his voice in his word. And fellowship with brothers and sisters in Christ becomes a precious corporate context in which to see and hear what fresh glories they bring out about Jesus in their words and prayers and obedience to him.
But we close with one more striking and unexpected means in verse 10 for how we know Jesus and come to know him more.
Fellowship of Sufferings
Look at verse 10 one last time:
. . . that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death . . .
Now, what we’ve said so far about knowing Christ is true, but the accent Paul adds here is suffering. How we come to know most deeply the risen Christ — his nearness, his pattern, his obedience, his holiness, his heart, his grace — is not in life’s easiest times and our most comfortable moments but in our sufferings.
What Paul has in mind here relates to what he’s just said about Christ’s example in chapter 2: “He humbled himself” (2:8). I don’t think that “becoming like him in his death” means that Paul anticipates a crucifixion for himself, or for us, but that he wants to know Christ by echoing Christ’s heart and “mind” (2:5):
[Being] in the form of God, he did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death. (2:6–8)
That’s the pattern Paul wants to be conformed to. He wants to know Christ by sharing in his sufferings, walking in the footsteps of his self-humbling, and experiencing Jesus’s help and fellowship and nearness and resurrection power on the path of obedience when it’s hardest.
We know Jesus not only as we walk with him in triumph but also — and typically all the more — as we cling to him in our suffering and find that he draws especially nearer to us in our suffering.
So, we might sum it up like this. There are two big parts to knowing him: Sunny days and stormy days. Bright days and dark days. Happy seasons and heavy seasons.
In the bright, sunny, happy seasons, we establish the steps of our lives. We learn to walk with him and get to know him as we walk with him. We cultivate habits for hearing his voice in his word by the Spirit and speaking to him in prayer in the fellowship of others who know him. Oh my, how vital are our fellows in Christ for knowing more of Jesus!
What we’re doing in those bright and sunny days is establishing trust and getting to know Jesus better so that when the rainy, stormy, dark, difficult days come, then we go especially deep with him. As many in this room know, it is often the times when we know him in our sufferings that we really know him best and come to know him more.
Supper Together
And we know him through eating with him at this Table. Here we know ourselves afresh as sinners, desperate, condemned apart from him. And we know his grace here — not just know about grace, but know grace, experience his grace. And through his grace, we know Christ himself.
So, while this Table is by no means the only practical avenue of knowing him, it is a vital one as we come here together week after week and eat and drink in faith. Which is why another name for the Lord’s Supper is Communion. We don’t just come here to eat and drink the grace he provides; we come here to encounter him. To know him.
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Hamilton: An American Prodigal
In July of 1741, a 37-year-old Jonathan Edwards grabbed a sermon already preached in Northampton and took it on the road to Enfield. There it was “attended with remarkable Impressions on many of the Hearers.”1 Edwards spoke of sinners in the hands of an angry God and grace to those in Christ in a message that would come to represent the First Great Awakening. “What are we,” Edwards asked, “that we should think to stand before him, at whose rebuke the earth trembles, and before whom the rocks are thrown down?”
Thirty years later, the spirit of Edwards was alive and well — yet in a most unlikely place and through a most unlikely pen. In August of 1772, a hurricane, described as “one of the most dreadful . . . that memory or any records whatever can trace,”2 swept through the Caribbean island of St. Croix. The fury came at dusk and “raged very violently till ten o’clock.” Then followed the eye, “a sudden and unexpected interval, which lasted about an hour.” Finally came four more hours of “redoubled fury . . . till near three o’clock in the morning.”
A few days later, after hearing a Sunday sermon, “a Youth of [the] Island,”3 seventeen years old, composed a letter to his derelict father, who was living on another island. The youth wrote, “It seemed as if a total dissolution of nature was taking place. . . . In a word, misery, in all its most hideous shapes, spread over the whole face of the country.” But this rare teen, in Edwards-like fashion, saw more than natural causation: “That which, in a calm unruffled temper, we call a natural cause, seemed then like the correction of the Deity.”4
Reforming Influences
It was no accident that this youth, named Alexander Hamilton, would take up such a perspective on the hurricane. Earlier that year, a Princeton graduate and pastor named Hugh Knox (1733–1790) had arrived on the island, discovered the precocious orphan, and begun to serve as a spiritual father to him.
In the 1750s, Knox had been student and good friend of Aaron Burr Sr. (1716–1757), founder and second president of the college in Princeton, New Jersey. Burr had married Esther Edwards, Jonathan’s third child (of eleven), and Burr himself greatly admired Edwards. Knox admired Burr. Now the young Hamilton sat at the feet of Knox, on September 6, 1772, as he preached on the hurricane. Later that day, the young Hamilton, imbibing the Calvinist theology, sat to compose the now-famous letter to his father.
Hamilton’s Christian interests cooled as they were eclipsed by political ambition and zeal for his work.
Doubtless, the first time Hamilton would have heard the name “Aaron Burr” was from Knox, speaking about the father, rather than his son. Burr Sr. died in 1757, just a year after the birth of his son. (Edwards then became the third president at Princeton and would have raised his grandson, Aaron Jr., had Edwards not died of a botched smallpox inoculation in 1758.)
In the fall of 1772, Knox was so impressed with Hamilton’s hurricane letter that he steered it to the local paper (published October 3, 1772), and it became the occasion for raising funds to send this gifted “Youth of this Island” to the mainland, in hopes he would study, as Knox had, at the college in Princeton.
‘Adore Thy God’
What did the seventeen-year-old Hamilton write? The hurricane had thundered, he claimed, “Despise thyself and adore thy God.” Yet Hamilton, in his Christian faith, found refuge:
See thy wretched helpless state, and learn to know thyself. Learn to know thy best support. Despise thyself, and adore thy God. . . . What have I to dread? My staff can never be broken — in Omnipotence I trusted. . . . He who gave the winds to blow, and the lightnings to rage — even him have I always loved and served. His precepts have I observed. His commandments have I obeyed — and his perfections have I adored. He will snatch me from ruin. He will exalt me to the fellowship of Angels and Seraphs, and to the fullness of never ending joys.
The young Hamilton then exhorts his readers, “Oh vain mortal! Check thy ill timed joy,” and he ends with this plea: “Oh Lord help. Jesus be merciful!”5
That same year, Hamilton wrote a Christian hymn, one that his future wife, Eliza, would come to prize and cling to during the half-century she outlived him. In the hymn, Hamilton confessed,
O Lamb of God! thrice gracious LordNow, now I feel how true thy word.6
Yet this early Hamilton is not the one we typically remember today, nor the one celebrated in the award-winning musical (which Lin-Manuel Miranda spent seven years writing, from 2008 until its debut on Broadway in 2015).
What Hamilton is perhaps most famous for is the circumstances of his death, in a so-called “affair of honor.” In the summer of 1804, Hamilton took a duel with Edwards’s grandson, Aaron Burr Jr., who was the sitting vice president of the United States. Strangely enough, citing Christian conviction, Hamilton “threw away his shot” by not firing at his opponent. Burr, however, took aim and struck his rival. Hamilton died 31 hours later on July 12, 1804.
Hamilton’s Four Stages
Remarkably, in 2004, Ron Chernow’s eight-hundred-page biography began the work of doing justice to Hamilton’s memory in the twenty-first century. More than a decade later, Miranda’s musical, inspired by the biography and with Chernow as historical consultant, sent Hamilton skyrocketing back into broader American awareness — and just in time to save his face on the ten-dollar bill.
Of our interest, Hamilton seems to have experienced a Christian conversion, under Reformed (and Edwardsean) teaching, when the Great Awakening came to the West Indies in the early 1770s. Yet from a Christian perspective, Hamilton’s story is complicated, to say the least.
In his late teens, he professed faith, wrote hymns and commentaries on the Bible, and daily knelt to pray. But in his youthful zeal to rise above his station and in his ascent to political prominence, he became a prodigal. None rose so fast and then fell so far as Hamilton. But when he was finally humbled, neither Chernow nor Miranda could ignore his “late-flowering religious interests.”7
In this complex life of Hamilton, Douglass Adair and Marvin Harvey, writing in 1955, identified “four distinct stages” in his spiritual development:
his early piety, from 1772–1777
a “fifteen-year period of complete religious indifference,” from 1777–1792
his “opportunistic religiosity,” from 1792 to 1800
his final season, from 1800 until his death in 1804, when he “began sincerely seeking God in this time of failure and suffering”8Jesus told a parable in Luke 15 of a youth who left home for a far country, squandered his life in reckless living, and eventually realized the world could not satisfy. In time, the young man “came to himself” and returned home to his father (Luke 15:17).
Whether there was a celebration in heaven on July 12, 1804, for the final homecoming of Alexander Hamilton, I cannot tell you with certainty. But I want you to hear the rest of the story, so far as we can tell, as we weave together both Jesus’s parable of the prodigal with these four distinct stages in Hamilton’s spiritual development.
A challenge here is that Hamilton’s life will look very different to a political scientist and a Christian pastor. I’m a pastor. Without doing injustice to his life as a statesman, I want to draw out, with special emphasis, the often-muted story of Hamilton’s prodigal journey and late-flowering faith.9
1. His Early Piety (1772–1777)
The younger son gathered all he had and took a journey into a far country. (Luke 15:13)
Hamilton was born in 1755 on the island of Nevis. Due to his mother’s previous marriage and alleged infidelity, his parents were not legally married. He had an older brother, and his father abandoned them when he was ten. Two years later, his mother died of yellow fever. Orphaned, Alexander and his brother went to live with a cousin, who soon thereafter committed suicide. At age fourteen, he went to work as a clerk for an importer-exporter on the island of St. Croix and excelled. In 1772, Knox arrived on St. Croix and took an interest in him.
After the publication of the hurricane letter, Hamilton came to New Jersey, hoping to enroll in Princeton. He proposed an abbreviated course of study to president John Witherspoon, who denied his request. (Recently a student named James Madison had completed a two-year fast-track at Princeton and worked himself into a nervous breakdown. Perhaps Witherspoon had Madison in mind when he declined Hamilton’s request.)
Undeterred, Hamilton took his proposal to King’s College in New York, where it was approved, and he began classes in the fall of 1773. As early as that summer, he made his first public speech in favor of the revolutionary cause. His college roommate, Robert Troup, remembered Hamilton’s “habit of praying upon his knees both night and morning” and that “he was a zealous believer in the fundamental doctrines of Christianity.”10
However, Hamilton’s physical and social journey into the far country soon led to a spiritual pilgrimage — or better, to spiritual lethargy and distraction, as the revolutionary spirit was fomenting in New York and began to draw forcefully on his energies. However devout he may have been at arrival, his unusually able brain and pen were soon captured by the feverish energy of the day. Rather than to Christian jeremiads and hymns, his attention turned to the revolution.
Ashbel Green (1762–1848), who would later serve as the eighth president of Princeton, reflected on those prewar days in the British colonies: “The military spirit that pervaded the whole land was exceedingly unfriendly to vital piety, among all descriptions of the citizens.” And this was especially so at the colleges:
Military enthusiasm had seized the minds of the students, to such a degree that they could think of little else than warlike operations. By the time the cloud of war had passed over, the colleges were more enamored of Deism and the French Revolution’s Cult of the Supreme Being than of orthodox piety.11
Hamilton too, alongside his fellow collegiates, was swept up into what was trending, into the talk of the cultural moment. And he had manifest abilities — skilled with words, brave enough for battle, and a natural leader. His revolutionary success quickly pulled him into the heart of American cause and its politics from 1775 to 1800, perhaps surpassed only by George Washington in that quarter century.
His Christian interests, however, cooled as they were eclipsed by political ambition and zeal for his work as Washington’s aide-de-camp, then in establishing a law practice in New York, and climactically as the nation’s first secretary of the treasury from 1789 to 1795. Alongside Madison, this young Hamilton would prove to be one of the great intellects of the founding generation. And while being every bit Madison’s match in political thought (if not exceeding him), he far surpassed Madison, and the other leading founders, in economics.
2. Fifteen Years of Indifference (1777–1792)
There [in the far country] he squandered his property in reckless living. (Luke 15:13)
Adair and Harvey call this the “fifteen-year period of complete religious indifference,” when politically he “shot up like a skyrocket.”12 Hamilton’s wordsmithing and courage had propelled him to revolutionary leadership. In 1777, he was promoted to Washington’s side.
Now 22 years old, he would be Washington’s right-hand man during the revolution and, later, under the new constitution, the first secretary of the treasury from 1789 until 1795. Then he would essentially function as the prime minister and occupy the most powerful seat in the first executive administration. Hamilton’s long-standing relationship with Washington proved to be a stabilizing force, at least in public life. In hindsight, his most productive (and least self-destructive) work came when he was most proximate to Washington.
But it was not only Washington (whose guidance was political) who influenced him, but also Eliza, whose sway was gently but relentlessly spiritual. He married her in 1780. She was, even then, what we would call an “evangelical Christian” today, and she became only more so as she aged.
“As a woman of deep spirituality, Eliza believed firmly in [Christian] instruction for her [eight] children,”13 and it would prove to have effects on her husband as they raised them together, and particularly as his great humblings came later. She endured his wandering and, in the end, may have won him with her life and conduct (1 Peter 3:1).
Hamilton was there at the battle of Yorktown in 1781, leading a battalion and with distinction. After the war, his ascending career seemed nonstop. In 1782, he was appointed to Congress from New York, under the Articles of Confederation. Here he would see firsthand how weak and inadequate they were for a league of thirteen states.
In 1783, he resigned from Congress to establish a law practice in New York. In 1786, he wrote the letter calling delegates to a convention in Philadelphia for the summer of 1787. He attended this Constitutional Convention, and the following year he organized and edited The Federalist Papers, partnering with Madison and John Jay to persuade New Yorkers to ratify the new Constitution.
Under Hamilton’s lead in 1789–1795, the Treasury Department drove the executive branch and new government. He grew the department to more than five hundred employees, while the War Department had a dozen employees, and Jefferson’s State Department only six.
And yet it was in this rapid rise, in his shooting up like a rocket, that cracks began to show — in particular, in 1791, in the adultery that Chernow calls “one of history’s most mystifying cases of bad judgment.”14 It would be whispered in private rooms until 1797 and then proclaimed from rooftops. We’ll come back to this in the next section.15
3. His ‘Opportunistic Religiosity’ (1792–1800)
When he had spent everything, a severe famine arose in that country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him into his fields to feed pigs. And he was longing to be fed with the pods that the pigs ate, and no one gave him anything. (Luke 15:14–16)
Washington began his second term in 1793. In January, France’s Louis XVI was executed. By June, the Committee of Public Safety came to power in Paris with its Reign of Terror. France became the unceasing controversy of Washington’s second term, driving party divisions deeper between Hamilton and Jefferson, who soon resigned.
With the furor over the French Revolution came fresh atheistic fears among many faithful Christians. Hamilton saw the pro-French Jeffersonians exposed and “attempted to enlist God in the Federalist party to buttress that party’s temporal power,” write Adair and Harvey.16
Unfortunately Hamilton’s blasphemous attempts to use God for his all-too-human ends were extremely successful with large numbers of the clergy. . . . Actually it is during these years when religious slogans were so often on his lips that Hamilton seems farther from God and from any understanding of his Son, Jesus Christ, than at any time in his whole career.17
Like Jefferson, Hamilton was eventually worn down by political libel and public slander. In debt, with a growing family at home, he decided to return to New York in 1795. In this season, his early forties, he would experience the beginning of his many humblings.
The Adams administration, beginning in 1797, would bring mounting frustrations — both for him and him for Adams. He began to make several terrible judgment calls. In October of 1799, Adams broke with his cabinet (and Hamilton) to send an envoy to France, and in the wake of that came what Chernow calls “a total loss of perspective by Hamilton, the nadir of his judgment.”18
The dominoes began to fall, and Hamilton with them. In December of 1799, Washington died, his surrogate father. By February 1800, it became clear that the Federalist party was turning from Hamilton to Adams. Then, by the end of April, Aaron Burr and his opposing coalition won control of New York. In a matter of months, Hamilton’s political power and influence crumbled.
To top it all off, in the election of 1800, his old cabinet rival Jefferson won the presidency — and with Burr as vice president. As Adair and Harvey write, “Perhaps never in all American political history has there been a fall from power so rapid, so complete, so final as Hamilton’s in the period from October 1799 to November 1800.”19
And all this just eighteen months after the papers got ahold of his six-year secret, the adultery of 1791. Hamilton, hoping to protect his financial reputation, published a painfully long and detailed pamphlet confessing to his marital infidelity. He plainly did not know when to stop. His finances may have been in order. His soul was not.
Back to the Squalor
From a Christian perspective, Hamilton’s adultery appears as his most glaring flaw, even more obviously and unqualifiedly than the duel. His adultery showed how far his heart had wandered — and reminds us of the delusion of power and success. We can indeed be most vulnerable when we feel strongest.
There once was a great king in Israel who, as a prelude to infidelity, remained in the city when others went to war (2 Samuel 11:1). So too Hamilton, at the height of his power in 1791 — and with so much work to do — stayed in Philadelphia while his family summered upstate.
That summer, a 23-year-old woman approached him, telling of an abusive husband and asking for help. Later, in the notorious Reynolds Pamphlet, his extended public confession in 1797, he would write that he came to her door with monetary assistance. “Some conversation ensued from which it was quickly apparent that other than pecuniary consolation would be acceptable.”20 This is the first of several 1790s instances about which Chernow, even as the cool-headed biographer (and measured admirer), appears stunned by Hamilton’s folly:
Such stellar success might have bred an intoxicating sense of invincibility. But his vigorous reign had also made him the enfant terrible of the early republic, and a substantial minority of the country was mobilized against him. This should have made him especially watchful of his reputation. Instead, in one of history’s most mystifying cases of bad judgment, he entered into a sordid affair with a married woman named Maria Reynolds that, if it did not blacken his name forever, certainly sullied it. From the lofty heights of statesmanship, Hamilton fell back into something reminiscent of the squalid world of his West Indian boyhood.21
Yet even with the Reynolds affair made public, devastating as it was, it was still another eighteen months before Hamilton began to utterly crumble.
4. His Final Season of Suffering and Seeking (1800–1804)
When he came to himself, he said, “How many of my father’s hired servants have more than enough bread, but I perish here with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired servants.’” And he arose and came to his father. (Luke 15:17–20)
One great irony of Hamilton’s story, and caution for us today, is that when he was at his best politically, he was at his worst in relation to Christ. And yet as he was humbled, turning again to Jesus, he could have been at his worst politically.
More terrible judgments followed the Reynolds Pamphlet.22 Even as late as the spring of 1802, he wrote a letter to fellow Federalist James Bayard proposing what he called a “Christian Constitutional Society.” I suspect this to be a genuine, though terribly naive, expression of his renewed Christian faith. It may also be one last gasp of his 1790s opportunism.
When Hamilton was at his best politically, he was at his worst in relation to Christ.
To counter Jefferson’s French-friendly Democratic Societies, Hamilton proposed a new society that would exist to promote (1) the Christian religion and (2) the Constitution of the United States. He saw both under Jeffersonian threat, but his Federalist interests were clearly political, or at least politically expedient.
“By signing up God against Thomas Jefferson,” says Chernow, “Hamilton hoped to make a more potent political appeal. . . . Hamilton was not honoring religion but exploiting it for political ends.” However misguided the effort, Chernow can’t help but recognize, “It is striking how religion preoccupied Hamilton during his final years.”23
Quiet Uptown
In November of 1801, the most devastating domino fell: his eldest child, Philip, age nineteen, died in a duel, defending his father’s honor. Learning of the duel, Hamilton had advised his son to take the righteous course and throw away his shot, that is, shoot into the air. But his son’s opponent did not. This would prove to be Alexander’s greatest devastation. Soon he would write to a friend that Philip’s death was “beyond comparison the most afflicting of my life.”24
Yet by late 1801, Hamilton was plainly taking deep solace in Christianity and Philip’s profession of faith: “It was the will of heaven and [Philip] is now out of the reach of the seductions and calamities of a world full of folly, full of vice, full of danger, of least value in proportion as it is best known. I firmly trust also that he has safely reached the haven of eternal repose and felicity.”25
“While the sufferings and frustrations resulting from political failure started Hamilton’s religious conversion,” claim Adair and Harvey, it was this “terrible personal tragedy [that] crystalized the change.”26 “This plenitude of sorrow . . . accounts for a totally new note — the first echo in all his writings of ‘Thy will be done’ — that now appears in certain Hamilton letters. . . . The old Hamilton arrogance had disappeared.”27
Hamilton’s spiritual renewal in this last season is too pronounced to ignore, whether in a first-rate biography or on Broadway. His reawakening appears to have just preceded (and prepared him for) Philip’s death. Miranda partially captures it in the aftermath of his loss, in the culminating song “Quiet Uptown,” where Hamilton sings,
I take the children to church on Sunday,A sign of the cross at the door,And I pray.That never used to happen before.
What may be a “grace too powerful to name” on Broadway is precisely the name we in the church know as powerful. And we name the name: Jesus.
In July of 1804, on the night before his own deadly duel, he would write,
This letter, my very dear Eliza, will not be delivered to you unless I shall first have terminated my earthly career to begin, as I humbly hope from redeeming grace and divine mercy, a happy immortality. . . . The consolations of [Christianity], my beloved, can alone support you and these you have a right to enjoy. Fly to the bosom of your God and be comforted. With my last idea, I shall cherish the sweet hope of meeting you in a better world. Adieu best of wives and best of women.28
And so we ask, Why the duel with Burr? Just three years prior, he had lost his firstborn to a duel. On multiple occasions, he publicly had expressed his own disavowal of dueling. How could he agree to this, and especially now as a professing Christian?
Instead of engaging in speculation, I’ll let Oliver Wolcott Jr., Hamilton’s successor as secretary of the treasury, express his sense of its senselessness. On the day of the duel, Wolcott wrote to his wife that
Gen’l Hamilton . . . reasoned himself into a belief, that though the custom [of dueling] was in the highest degree criminal, yet there were peculiar reasons which rendered it proper for him, to expose himself to Col. Burr in particular. This instance of the derangement of intellect of a great mind, on a single point, has often been noticed as one of the most common yet unaccountable frailties of human nature.29
This was, thought Wolcott, “the derangement of intellect of a great mind, on a single point.” Wolcott added at the end his letter, “Gen’l Hamilton has of late years expressed his conviction of the truths of the Christian Religion.”
However tragic and ill-conceived his decision to row across the river to the dueling grounds in New Jersey, that would be not the place of his death. Hamilton threw away his shot while Burr’s bullet struck him in the liver and lodged in his spine. Hamilton seemed dead onsite but revived on the open water while being rowed back to New York. He lived another 31 hours, until 2:00pm the following day.
Mercy Through the Redeemer
Hamilton’s professions of faith on his deathbed are by no means his only indications of Christian faith, but they are his clearest and most documented.
First, he called for Benjamin Moore, episcopal bishop of New York and president of Columbia (formerly King’s) College. He asked to receive the Lord’s Supper. Hamilton was not a church member, so Moore hesitated to administer the sacrament (he would return later and administer it). Moore asked him, “Do you sincerely repent of your sins past? Have you a lively faith in God’s mercy through Christ, with a thankful remembrance of the death of Christ? And are you disposed to live in love and charity with all men?”30
According to Moore, Hamilton “lifted up his hands and said, ‘With the utmost sincerity of heart I can answer those questions in the affirmative — I have no ill will against Col. Burr. I met him with a fixed resolution to do him no harm. I forgive all that happened.’” Moore says that he “had no reason to doubt [Hamilton’s] sincerity.”31
Rich Grace, Only Refuge
A second minister also visited Hamilton on his deathbed — his old friend Rev. John M. Mason, pastor of the Scotch Presbyterian Church.32 Mason told Hamilton that he
had nothing to address him in his affliction, but that same gospel of the grace of God, which it is my office to preach to the most obscure and illiterate: that in the sight of God all men are on a level, as all men have sinned and come short of his glory [Romans 3:23]; and that they must apply to him for pardon and life, as sinners, whose only refuge is in his grace by righteousness through our Lord Jesus Christ [Romans 5:21].
Hamilton responded, “I perceive it to be so. I am a sinner: I look to his mercy.” Mason then turned his attention to
the infinite merit of the Redeemer, as the propitiation for sin, the sole ground of our acceptance with God; the sole channel of his favor to us; and cited the following passages of Scripture: There is no name given under heaven among men, whereby we must be saved, but the name of Jesus [Acts 4:12]. He is able to save them to the uttermost who come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them [Hebrews 7:25]. The blood of Jesus Christ cleanseth from all sin [1 John 1:7].
Mason reminded him that “the precious blood of Christ was as effectual and as necessary to wash away the transgression which had involved him in suffering, as any other transgression; and that he must there, and there alone, seek peace for his conscience. . . . He assented, with strong emotions, to these representations, and declared his abhorrence of the whole transaction.”33 Mason then
recurred to the topic of the divine compassions; the freedom of pardon in the Redeemer Jesus to perishing sinners. “That grace, my dear General, which brings salvation is rich, rich.”
“Yes,” interrupted [Hamilton], “it is rich grace.”
“And on that grace,” continued [Mason], “a sinner has the highest encouragement to repose his confidence, because it is tendered to him upon the surest foundation; the scripture testifying that ‘we have redemption through the blood of Jesus, the forgiveness of sins according to the riches of his grace’ [Ephesians 1:7].”
At this point, Hamilton looked upward and said with emphasis, “I have a tender reliance on the mercy of the Almighty, through the merits of the Lord Jesus Christ.” Mason’s narrative continues with more Scripture and further affirmations from Hamilton.
Finally, writes Mason,
As I was retiring, [Hamilton] lifted up his hands in the attitude of prayer, and said feebly, “God be merciful to — ” His voice sunk, so that I heard not the rest distinctly, but understood him to quote the words of the publican in the Gospel, and to end with “me a sinner.”34
Puritan Roots and Prayers
Clearly Hamilton’s late-life return to his early faith and his deathbed confessions raise questions. As Christians, many of us may feel both relief and some uneasiness at the whole scene. That Hamilton never joined a church is troubling. Not many thieves on the cross have God as their Father but not the church as their mother. That is sobering.35 Perhaps he was an exception.
And those of us who grieve his long, tragic journey into the far country of political success and pride want to redouble our resolve to live now for what matters eternally and to welcome God’s humbling hand if we realize ourselves to have strayed.
Lest Hamilton’s late-life Christian faith contribute to a distorted impression of the nation’s founding, we’re wise to concede that this, meager as it is, may be one of the clearer affirmations of evangelical faith among the inner circle of the founders. You will not find such in Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, or Madison. (One exception is John Jay.) This is not to make much of Hamilton’s reticent and late-flowering faith but to own how unevangelical was the nation’s founding.
Hamilton’s political career is a warning to those today who pine to be in the room “where it happens.” Hamilton was there. It did not satisfy. For him, it led to the eroding and near ruin of what mattered most. His life is a cautionary tale.
Hamilton’s succession of humblings and his late-flowering Christian faith show us a man who rose to the top and was not satisfied with what this world alone has on offer. Military achievement and fame, political influence and position, success as a lawyer, an adoring wife, and eight children — his heart remained restless until, through much of his own sin and folly, he fell headlong.
But in his great humblings, he did seem to “come to himself” and find rest in the Savior in whom he first professed faith in his youth. For years, his life looked to Christian eyes like the third soil, “choked by the cares and riches and pleasures of life” (Luke 8:14). But perhaps, as Hamilton wrote in his hurricane letter, his Lord did “snatch me from ruin.” In his final season, and particularly in his clear final confessions, he professed “tender reliance on the mercy of the Almighty, through the merits of the Lord Jesus Christ.”
May we too not only depart, but live now with such a reliance — and observing Hamilton’s follies, be spared some of our own.
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My Cancer-Free Answered Prayer: How God Healed Our Little Girl
Death is our mortal enemy — an enemy that Jesus defanged (Hebrews 2:14–15), and one day will utterly destroy (Revelation 21:4). He revealed his omnipotent power over death by raising people from the dead (Mark 5:41–42; Luke 7:11–17; John 11:33–34). Through his own resurrection, he revealed that all authority in heaven and earth is his (Matthew 28:16). D-Day over death for all who believe has arrived (2 Timothy 1:10), and V-Day’s future has been secured (1 Corinthians 15:25–26).
How then should we pray for God to heal our dying loved ones? On the one hand, until Jesus returns, death is an inescapable reality for everyone (Hebrews 9:27). So praying for healing isn’t always God’s will. In the case of a dying great-grandmother, for example, we may be more in line with God’s will not by praying for healing, but by praying for her to finish well (Philippians 1:23), trusting that because her Savior has conquered death for her, she will never see it, not even for a second (John 8:51).
On the other hand, because Jesus robbed death of its life-stealing power by bearing the full wrath of God for our sins (2 Corinthians 5:21), we sometimes should pray that he would snatch our loved ones from the grasp of death. We can pray for miracles, asking him to spare us the sorrow upon sorrow that comes from seemingly untimely deaths (Philippians 2:27), even as we trust him for his answer, whatever it might be.
‘She Can’t Breathe’
In a recent article, I shared how God humbled me and taught me to trust him through my daughter’s battle with cancer when she was 8 years old. Despite our prayers for God to spare her life, she drifted closer and closer to death’s door. The new “promising” experimental treatment we authorized further robbed us of hope when it gave her a life-threatening side effect called VOD of the liver.
The worst part was how she was laboring to breathe. That’s the final line to cross before death, isn’t it — no longer being able to breathe the breath of life (Genesis 2:7; 3:19)? Our doctor told us that if she continued to struggle, they would have to put her on a ventilator. They would sedate her and strap her down before intubation so that she could not pull out the ventilator. Taking that step could mean that my wife and I would never speak with our daughter again.
Then it happened. It was two o’clock in the morning when the pediatrics ICU doctor woke me up. “We have to put your daughter on a ventilator right now. She can’t breathe, and her carbon-dioxide level is past the emergency benchmark.” Everyone had been dreading this moment, but here it was. Desperate, I called my wife so she could rush to the hospital, perhaps in time to speak one last time with her baby, but she didn’t pick up the phone. My daughter was dying, and the person she loved more than anyone on earth wouldn’t be there to hold her and say goodbye. I was broken.
Waiting and Praying
Then, like the voice of an angel, the nurse whispered to me, “Dad, if you are not comfortable, they can’t make you do this.” And so, when our doctor returned with the ventilator, I told her I wanted to wait and pray. The doctor’s countenance morphed. Her voice steeled. She said that if they didn’t intubate my daughter right then, she could go into cardiac arrest. The doctor warned me repeatedly, but each time I firmly told her I wanted to pray and wait. I’m no doctor, and as a rule, I hear and receive doctors’ recommendations. But in this moment, I couldn’t shake the sense that God wanted me to pray and wait.
“God calls us to pray, believing that there is nothing too difficult for him.”
Eventually, everyone left the room, and I dropped to my knees. “God, you said if we ask you for a fish, you won’t give us a serpent. If we ask you for bread, you won’t give us a stone. God, I am asking you to give me my daughter’s life.” I prayed through the night. Each hour I prayed, my daughter’s carbon-dioxide levels dramatically improved, and her breathing grew stronger. In the morning, her doctor came into the room and removed the order for the ventilator, and the following week, he let her come home for a weeklong visit before her second round of chemotherapy.
Our daughter, who had been at death’s door only a few days before, was home with no detectable cancer to be found in her body. God and God alone did that.
Amazing Providence
My daughter was cancer-free, but she was far from being out of danger. Because the first round of chemotherapy had almost killed her, her bone-marrow specialist wanted her to skip the final two rounds and go straight to receiving a bone-marrow transplant. Our oncologist disagreed and told us he believed bone-marrow transplants work best when even the imperceptible levels of cancer are reduced by the final rounds of chemotherapy.
Because they couldn’t agree, they left the decision with us, giving us the weekend to decide whether to continue with two more rounds of chemo or go straight to a transplant. So my wife and I went away for a night to pray and seek wisdom from a multitude of counselors. We called friends with medical backgrounds, although we hadn’t spoken to some of them in over twenty years. And how God providentially answered our prayers seemed even more amazing than how he miraculously strengthened my daughter’s breathing.
Oncology Expert
We called Judy, who used to attend a UCLA Bible study with me. I had heard that she worked as an oncology nurse at a children’s hospital in Los Angeles. She told me that the doctor who trained our oncologist was actually at her hospital. Then she said, “You won’t believe this, but the doctor who wrote the national experimental protocol that your daughter is on just walked past me, and I’ll check with her!” Both doctors agreed that under our circumstances, we could go straight to the bone-marrow transplant and skip the final two rounds of chemotherapy.
Bone-Marrow Expert
Then my wife, who years ago had spent a year in medical school, called a former classmate, Larry, who suggested that we reach out to the UCLA bone-marrow transplant department. When we pulled up their webpage, my wife recognized a high-school classmate, LaVette, and I recognized one of the doctors, Ted Moore, with whom I had attended a UCLA Bible study. We called the number listed, and my wife’s high-school friend picked up. She said she had never answered that phone but had just so happened to be walking past it when it rang. Dr. Moore was in a meeting, but she would have him call us back as soon as he was free. Within the hour, I answered the phone to “Hey, Bobby. It’s Ted.” The unassuming UCLA student I knew from sixteen years ago had become Dr. Theodore Moore, a renowned expert in bone-marrow transplants. With complete confidence, he counseled us to go straight to the transplant.
VOD Expert
Finally, we called Dr. John Vierling, a liver specialist. My wife and I had met him years ago when her cousin asked my wife to sing at the funeral for Dr. Vierling’s son. Our concern was whether having a history of VOD would make the risk of undergoing a bone-marrow transplant too great for our daughter, because a major risk from these transplants is contracting VOD. As God would have it, Dr. Vierling was an expert on VOD, and he counseled us that we could safely proceed with the transplant.
Through the unveiling of his amazing providence, God had answered our prayer. We authorized our daughter to undergo a bone-marrow transplant at City of Hope eighteen years ago. Eighteen years later, she is a walking cancer-free miracle of God.
He Holds Every Breath
I know my daughter’s story is just one among many stories that end so differently. We journeyed through our trial with four other families — three children my daughter’s age and one adult, all of whom had similar types of cancer. We prayed for each of them, but none of them survived. God does not answer every prayer for healing. So, how might he have us pray when our loved ones need a miracle?
“Our primary prayer is always that God would prepare the hearts of our dying loved ones to see Jesus.”
First, armed with the trust that God sovereignly ordains our prayers as a means to accomplish his ends, we freely pray for miracles, as Elijah did (James 5:17–18). Honestly, before God healed my daughter, I would pray for God to heal others, but I didn’t necessarily expect to see a miracle. For that, I repent. God calls us to pray, believing that there is nothing too difficult for him, including healing our loved ones on their deathbeds.
At the same time, however, we pray with the kind of faith that does not rest on God saying yes to our prayers (2 Corinthians 12:8–9). By his grace, we can accept his answer when it’s no, as David did (2 Samuel 12:16–23), and we can submit to his will and worship him when we can’t understand his answer, as Job did (Job 1:21; 42:1–3).
Christians also embrace the reality that, until Jesus returns, everyone we love will die, and our lives are but a vapor in light of eternity, whether we die at age 10 or 100. So our primary prayer is always that God would prepare the hearts of our dying loved ones to see Jesus, and that he would grant our unbelieving loved ones repentance and faith toward Jesus. Our first prayer for our daughter was for her soul’s salvation.
A wise friend reminded me, when we were enduring our trial, that God holds the pen that is writing our story. Everything God writes is good: in the end, we will see his story as good, and in the present, we believe it to be for our good. So yes, pray for a miracle, and trust that God holds your loved one’s next and last breaths.
