Audio Transcript

Welcome back this Monday morning. We begin our new week together asking whether we should encourage non-Christians to pray for faith. Or is a faithless prayer like that basically pointless? Here’s the question: “Dear Pastor John, my name is Jeff, a PhD student in Los Angeles. My question is about faith. Many times, I have been evangelizing my friends and they say that they admire my faith, but they don’t possess faith like mine. They have difficulty believing themselves. I always tell them that God generously supplies faith, and it’s not something I mustered up myself. I might show them 1 Peter 1:3: ‘He [God] . . . caused us to be born again.’ Or 1 Corinthians 2:11–14: ‘We received the Spirit . . . that we might understand.’ What should I tell someone who realizes that God gives us faith, but who feels stuck, waiting for God to give them that faith? The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God until they’ve been given the Spirit. Or should a faithless person not pray at all? Do they simply wait until God may (or may not) give his Spirit?”

Well, first let me agree with Jeff that saving faith is humanly impossible. The fallen, sinful, spiritually dead human soul does not have the moral ability to believe. They have the mental powers, they have the powers of volition, but the heart is so bent away from God, it cannot make itself prefer God. You can’t make yourself love God; you can’t make yourself treasure God; you can’t make yourself rely upon God if you are dead and bent away from God.

Dead, Blind, Unable

When the rich young man turned away from Jesus and refused to follow him, in love with his money, Jesus said, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of [heaven].” And his disciples threw up their hands and said, “Well, who then can be saved?” (Matthew 19:24–25). And Jesus didn’t respond by saying, “Oh, you overinterpreted my words.” He didn’t say that. He said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26).

And Paul underscored this condition of the natural human heart with the words, “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to [he cannot] understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:14). In Romans 8:7, he said, “The mind of the flesh [that is the natural mind, the unregenerate, unconverted, non-born-again mind] is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot.” Or again, Ephesians 2:5, “We were dead in our trespasses” — and that’s how God found us and made us alive.

That deadness included a blindness to the glory of Christ: “The god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” (2 Corinthians 4:4). Christ does not look glorious or supremely valuable or desirable to the fallen human heart. A new birth is needed, a spiritual resurrection.

God Does the Impossible

Yet the command remains for unbelievers to believe. God has the right to require from humans what they ought to render to him, even if sin has made that rendering humanly impossible. We are responsible to do what we ought to do, even if we are so bad we won’t — and thus can’t — do it.

For example, in Acts 16:30–31, the jailer cried out, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” And they say, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved.” And Paul isn’t the first to command the impossible. Ezekiel looked out on a field of dry bones and prophesied, “Hey, dry bones, live.” And they did (Ezekiel 37:4–6). Jesus did the same in John 11 with Lazarus. He spoke to a dead man, “Lazarus, come forth” (John 11:43). And he did.

“Human evangelism is indispensable in the miracle God works to raise the spiritually dead and give them saving faith.”

And Jesus sends us — he sent Paul and us — out to do the same impossible thing. He said in Acts 26:17–18, “I am sending you to open their eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God.” Human evangelism is indispensable in the miracle that God works to raise the spiritually dead and give them saving faith. “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth” (1 Corinthians 3:6). Humans plant; humans water — absolutely essential. And God does the impossible — he gives life.

And the reason faith is impossible for spiritually dead sinners is not that spiritually dead sinners can’t make decisions, but that faith is more than a decision. Saving faith is a treasuring faith, a treasuring trust. Faith involves seeing Christ not just as useful for getting out of hell or getting well or getting rich. Saving faith sees Christ as glorious — better than any other treasure in the world. That’s why faith is not possible for sin-loving, self-exalting humans, unless they are born again. We must be born again.

Born Again by the Word

But Peter says — and now we’re getting close to the issue that was raised — Peter says the miracle of the new birth comes by the word. In other words, alongside 1 Peter 1:3, which Jeff quotes — “[God] . . . caused us to be born again” — we must put 1 Peter 1:23–25:

You have been born again . . . through the living and abiding word of God. For “all flesh is like grass, and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls, but the word of the Lord remains forever.” And this word is the good news that was preached to you.

Now that implies two things in answer to Jeff’s question about what to say to an unbeliever who listens to all of this and feels paralyzed, as if the only thing he can do is simply wait — like lie in bed, sit in a chair, and wait — for a gift of faith.

The first thing it implies is that “faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God” (Romans 10:17 NKJV) — or to use Peter’s words, new birth comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. Therefore, the absolutely key thing to say to the unbeliever is, “Keep reading the word of God. Keep listening on your app to the word of God. Keep pondering the word of God. Don’t be passive. Here’s a book. Read it. Be greedy, greedy, greedy for understanding the word — as greedy as you are for silver and gold.”

This is how faith is sustained for believers; this is how faith comes into being and is awakened for unbelievers: “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” New birth comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God. Keep exposing yourself to the word of God in whatever way you can. And believer, keep putting it forward.

“Keep exposing yourself to the word of God in whatever way you can.”

The other thing implied in 1 Peter 1 is that we should encourage the unbeliever to call out to God for eyes to see and ears to hear and a mind to understand. Remember the man who cried out, “I believe; help my unbelief” in Mark 9:24? I think he could have said, “O God, help my unbelief!” In the Old Testament, several times we are taught that those who feel unable — in other words, paralyzed, trapped in their own inability, in their own sin — to return to God should cry out. This is an exact quote from Lamentations 5:21: “Cause me to return, and I will return, O God.” Isn’t that an amazing prayer? “Cause me to return, and I will return. Enable me, and I will be able. Make me come, and I will come. Do whatever it takes, God.” So we encourage the unbeliever to pray.

Christ in Our Concern

Besides keeping the word before unbelievers and encouraging them to pray, I would mention one more thing. Keep leaning in to their lives personally with care. Keep communicating, not to make yourself a nuisance — you need spiritual discernment to know when that’s happening — but to show them that you really do want them to believe and be saved, to be your everlasting brother or sister with God forever in joy. Just as God may open their eyes to see the glory of Christ in the gospel, he may also open their eyes to see the love of Christ in your concern.

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”8

Jesus 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.

In an episode of Ask Pastor John, Jason from Kampala (the capital of Uganda), asked Pastor John a pointed question regarding why Africans have suffered so much. He wrote:

Does God care for Africans? Providence has a long track record here. Throughout history we have been a beastly, deplorable, enslaveable race — constantly riddled with disease, famine, and suffering. How are we not to conclude that we are God’s least favorite race? Every day is pure struggle for most Ugandans. I know God promises to look after all people, but it still makes me wonder, why does he especially seem to hate Africa so much?

When I read those words, my heart grieved. It still does. Since I first heard them (and Pastor John’s four points of wisdom on the providence of God), I have longed to give voice more directly and explicitly to Scripture’s truths regarding God’s heart for all nations, including those from Africa.

I am a father of three adopted African children. I also regularly lead teams to Africa to help the churches train leaders and care for orphans and widows. I love Africa, and in recent years I have also been discovering the key role that Africa in general, and black Africa in particular, has played in God’s redemptive plan. Because Uganda is related to the Bible’s portrait of black Africa, I have narrowed most of my scriptural overview to this sphere, but the whole still bears broader significance to Africa at large.

My own journey of discovery began when I, as an Old Testament professor, started studying the book of Zephaniah, who was likely a black Judean prophet. My journey has taken me from Genesis to Revelation, and I hope this brief survey will help Jason in Kampala and others to recognize God’s love for Africa and to hope in God’s steadfast love toward all who are in Christ, whether from Africa or beyond.

God’s Chosen Prophet

The book of Zephaniah opens, “The word of the Lord that came to Zephaniah the son of Cushi, son of Gedaliah, son of Amariah, son of Hezekiah, in the days of Josiah the son of Amon, king of Judah” (Zephaniah 1:1). “Zephaniah” means “Yahweh has hidden,” and his name testifies to his parents’ living faith in God and their hope in his protective care during the dark days of King Manasseh (696–642 BC, see 2 Kings 21).

Not only this, Zephaniah was a Judean in the Davidic royal line. His great-great-grandfather was King Hezekiah (729–686 BC), who led a massive spiritual awakening that was paralleled in Judah’s history only by the work of King Josiah (640–609 BC), whose spiritual reforms Zephaniah’s own preaching helped to serve (622 BC). We also learn that Zephaniah’s father was Cushi, and this fact suggests that this prophet was biracial. Cush was ancient black Africa, and Zephaniah’s grandmother (Gedaliah’s wife) was probably a black African who married into the Jewish royal line. She then named her son “Cushite” or “My Blacky,” celebrating his ethnic heritage. As a biracial prophet, Zephaniah displayed the hope of a diversified people of God in fulfillment of Yahweh’s promises to Abraham regarding his saving blessing reaching the nations (Genesis 12:3; 22:18).

“As a biracial prophet, Zephaniah displayed the hope of a diversified people of God.”

Support for Zephaniah’s biracial background comes in how he highlights Cush with respect to both punishment and restoration. First, in Zephaniah 2:12, Cush is the only neighbor he mentions that has already experienced God’s judgment. While the English translations treat the verse as future, the historical context and the Hebrew suggest that Cush’s demise was already past. Specifically, when Yahweh declares, “You also, O Cushites, have been slain by my sword,” he is likely referring to the fall of the 25th Egyptian dynasty (663 BC) that the Cushites controlled and to which Nahum earlier referred when he wrote against Nineveh, declaring, “Are you better than Thebes that sat by the Nile?” (Nahum 3:8). In Zephaniah, as in Nahum, the Lord’s punishment had started with Cush, and their fall gave proof that Nineveh’s fall would soon come (Zephaniah 2:13–15).

But there is more, for Zephaniah elevates Cush as his sole example of end-times hope for the world. Speaking about the future day of the Lord, when God would right all wrongs and reestablish right order and peace, the prophet writes,

At that time I will change the speech of the peoples to a pure speech, that all of them may call upon the name of the Lord and serve him with one accord. From beyond the rivers of Cush my worshipers, the daughter of my dispersed ones, shall bring my offering. (Zephaniah 3:9–10)

What the prophet envisions here is astounding, and how the New Testament sees it fulfilled is breathtaking. But before unpacking it, let’s recall the Old Testament’s portrait of Cush, which reaches back to the earliest chapters of Genesis.

Africa in Old Testament History

Africa’s Cushite empire was centered in modern Sudan and stretched south and eastward into the regions of present-day South Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, and Somalia and across the Red Sea into what was ancient Sheba.

The prophet Moses married a woman from this area (Numbers 12:1), and later a queen from the region heard of King Solomon’s fame concerning Yahweh’s name and came to Jerusalem to encounter firsthand the king’s wisdom and prosperity (1 Kings 10:1–10). A millennium later, when faced with the hard-heartedness of the Jewish religious leaders, Jesus declared, “The queen of the South will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and behold, something greater than Solomon is here” (Matthew 12:42).

We first learn of the region of Cush as a terminus location of one of the four rivers flowing from Eden (Genesis 2:13). This link highlights God’s intent to bring life to Africa. The area of Cush and the people associated with it were named after Noah’s grandson through Ham.

Important for our understanding Zephaniah’s prophecy is the fact that Cush’s son Nimrod is the one who built ancient Babel[on], where God confronted those seeking to exalt their own name, confused the world’s languages, and scattered peoples across the planet (Genesis 10:6–10; 11:1–9). Those descending from Cush dispersed to Africa’s horn in the northeast part of the continent. They are among the “families” and “nations” that Yahweh then promised to bless, ultimately through Abraham’s messianic offspring, who would overcome curse and the enemy and bring blessing into the world:

To the serpent: I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel. (Genesis 3:15)

To Abraham: I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. (Genesis 12:3)

To Abraham: And your offspring shall possess the gate of his enemies, and in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed. (Genesis 22:17–18)

Thus, Paul declared, “The Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, ‘In you shall all the nations be blessed’” (Galatians 3:8).

After Israel settled into the promised land and the kingdom divided, Judah made many political alliances with the nation of Cush prior to Zephaniah’s ministry (Isaiah 18:1–2; 20:5–6). Jerusalem’s leadership also had strong ties with black Africans (2 Samuel 18:21; Jeremiah 38:7; 39:16), which identifies how Zephaniah’s grandmother could have been a Cushite.

Africa in Other Prophecies

The prophet Jeremiah queried, “Can an Ethiopian [literally, Cushite] change his skin or the leopard his spots?” (Jeremiah 13:23). The Cushites are frequently a part of prophetic oracles of both punishment and restoration. As for punishment, Yahweh identified how he would lead Assyria to overcome Egypt and Cush, resulting in those in Judah being “dismayed and ashamed because of Cush their hope and Egypt their boast” (Isaiah 20:5). Similarly, with words akin to Zephaniah, Ezekiel declared, “The day of the Lord is near,” and then noted, “A sword shall come upon Egypt and anguish shall be upon Cush” (Ezekiel 30:3–4).

But a remnant from Cush would also be a part of the great new exodus that God would work in the days of the Messiah. As Isaiah testified just after foretelling the rise of the Messiah’s kingdom that would extend to all nations,

In that day the Lord will extend his hand yet a second time to recover the remnant that remains of his people, from Assyria, from Egypt, from Pathros, from Cush, from Elam, from Shinar, from Hamath, and from the coastlands of the sea. He will raise a signal for the nations and will assemble the banished of Israel, and gather the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth. (Isaiah 11:11–12)

With a similar anticipation, the psalmists spoke of a remnant of black Africans being among those to whom Yahweh would grant new birth certificates. Thus, he would regard them as full-fledged children in his family, and their new home would be the transformed Jerusalem:

Among those who know me I mention Rahab and Babylon; behold, Philistia and Tyre, with Cush — “This one was born there,” they say. And of Zion it shall be said, “This one and that one were born in her”; for the Most High himself will establish her. The Lord records as he registers the peoples, “This one was born there.” (Psalm 87:4–6)

From Beyond the Rivers of Cush

Now we can return to Zephaniah 3. Here Yahweh urges the faithful remnant from Judah and beyond to “wait for me” for the day when he would rise as judge (Zephaniah 3:8a). He gives two reasons to compel such patient trust, each beginning with “for”: (1) he still intends to gather and punish all the earth’s people groups (nations) and powers (kingdoms) (Zephaniah 3:8b), and (2) he has purposed to preserve and transform a multiethnic remnant from these peoples into his eternal worshipers (Zephaniah 3:9–10). We, thus, read,

For at that time I will change the speech of the peoples to a pure speech, that all of them may call upon the name of the Lord and serve him with one accord. From beyond the rivers of Cush my worshipers, the daughter of my dispersed ones, shall bring my offering. (Zephaniah 3:9–10)

“The rivers of Cush” were likely the White and Blue Nile (see Isaiah 18:1–2). In seeing supplicants journey with offerings to Yahweh at his sanctuary, it’s as if the descendants of those once exiled from Eden are now following the rivers of life back to their source in order to enjoy fellowship with the great King (Genesis 2:10–14; cf. Revelation 22:1–2). And these worshipers consist of a multiethnic group from the “peoples” of the world, all of whom have transformed speech patterns that call on Yahweh’s name.

“What Zephaniah envisions here is nothing less than the reversal of the tower of Babel judgment.”

What Zephaniah envisions here is nothing less than the reversal of the tower of Babel judgment. You will recall that a Cushite built Babel[on] and that those shaping the tower were seeking to make a “name” for themselves (Genesis 10:8–10; 11:4). We then read that “[the place] was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth. And from there the Lord dispersed them over the face of the earth” (Genesis 11:9). When it says God confused “the language,” the Hebrew word is the same as that translated “speech” in Zephaniah 3:9, and when it says that God “dispersed” the peoples, it uses the same word for “my dispersed ones” in Zephaniah 3:10. Indeed, the only places in all the Bible that include the nouns “name” and “language” and the verb “dispersed” are Genesis 11 and Zephaniah 3.

Back in Zephaniah 2:12, Yahweh declared punishment on Cush. Now in Zephaniah 3:9–10, he predicts that even the most distant lands upon which God has poured his wrath will have a worshiping remnant whom his presence will compel to the transformed Jerusalem, thus reversing the curse of Babel. The prophet elevates the region of Cush as his sole example of God’s end-time new creational transformation.

So how does the New Testament reflect on this prophecy?

Salvation of an African

When Luke crafted the book of Acts, I believe he had Zephaniah 3:9–10 in mind. In the context of explaining a mission of making worshipers “to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8), Peter’s Pentecost sermon in Acts 2:17–21 cites Joel 2:28–32, which depicts the day of the Lord and mentions calling on God’s name in ways very similar to Zephaniah (Zephaniah 3:8–9). What is not found in Joel, however, but is present in Zephaniah 3:9–10 is the vision of transformed “speech” (LXX = “tongue”) and united devotion, both of which Luke highlights in detailing the outpouring of “tongues” (Acts 2:4, 11) and the amazing kinship enjoyed by the early believers (Acts 2:42–47).

With this, it is important to note that the Greeks called ancient Cush “Ethiopia,” a name that is strikingly absent from the list of nations in Acts 2 that Luke tells us were gathered “from every nation under heaven” (Acts 2:5; cf. 9–11). The reason he never mentions “Ethiopia” there was most likely because he sought to highlight the fulfillment of Zephaniah’s vision by noting the conversion of the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8:26–40 (cf. Isaiah 56:3–8). The first-known Gentile convert to Christianity was a Cushite, and this highlights that God was beginning to fulfill the shaping of his multiethnic community of worshipers, just as Zephaniah proclaimed.

Hope for Every People and Nation

A second way the New Testament reflects on what Zephaniah envisioned is that Jesus’s resurrection ignited a global movement of making “disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19). Thus, Jesus’s followers bore witness to his greatness “in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8).

In broader fulfillment of Zephaniah’s restoration hope in 3:9–10, Jesus’s first coming marks the beginning of the end of the first creation and initiates the new creation, which corresponds to the new covenant (2 Corinthians 5:17; Galatians 6:15; Hebrews 8:13). In this age, God counts all those in Christ as offspring of Abraham, adopted sons and full heirs of all the promises (Galatians 3:8, 16, 29; 4:4–6). There is one people of God, the church (Ephesians 2:14–16). This means that Cushites like Simeon/Niger and Jews like Saul/Paul could be part of the same Christian congregation in Antioch (Acts 13:1), and that Christian Greeks like Titus didn’t need to be circumcised (Galatians 2:3).

Revelation 5:9–10 declares that Jesus is shaping “a kingdom and priests” “from every tribe and language and people and nation” (cf. Revelation 7:9–10). With the salvation of the black African politician in Acts 8:26–40, the Lord Jesus sparked the beginning of the end that will culminate in global praise to God, who is working all his purposes well — from Genesis through Zephaniah to Revelation. As Zephaniah envisioned (Zephaniah 3:9–10), already we as multiethnic Christian priests are offering sacrifices of praise (Romans 12:1; Hebrews 13:15–16; 1 Peter 2:5) at “Mount Zion and . . . the heavenly Jerusalem” (Hebrews 12:22; cf. Isaiah 2:2–3; Zechariah 8:20–23; Galatians 4:26).

Nevertheless, we await the day when the “new Jerusalem” will descend from heaven as the new earth (Revelation 21:2, 10; cf. Isaiah 65:17–18). Then our daily journey to find rest in Christ’s supremacy and sufficiency (Matthew 11:28–29; John 6:35) will come to completion in a place where the curse is no more (Revelation 21:22–22:5). On that day, all God’s children in Jesus — black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles — will indeed call on Yahweh’s name together and celebrate that they are free at last.

Does God Love Africa?

So, does God care for Africans? Both Scripture and history declare it so. In the beginning God intentionally directed the waters of life to Africa, thus identifying his intent to satisfy the thirsty and to make desolate places fertile (Genesis 2:13). While the world’s story has proven that the Lord takes Africans’ sins as seriously as those of others, it also testifies to God’s pleasure in saving Africans and in using their transformation as a marker of hope for what he intends to do in the rest of the world.

In saving the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:26–39), the Lord began reversing the destructive effects of the tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1–9; cf. Zephaniah 3:9–10) and inaugurated a global ingathering that will culminate in omni-ethnic praise to Jesus at the end of the age (Revelation 5:9–10; 7:9–10). The living waters are still flowing to Africa, and Jesus’s invitations are still ringing: “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink” (John 7:37; cf. 4:10, 14; Revelation 22:17). All who answer the call shall not “thirst anymore” for he “will guide them to springs of living water, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes” (Revelation 7:16–17). Such hope is available for all in Africa and beyond.