Andrew Bonar sat at his desk late in the afternoon of March 25, 1843. He scribbled out the final edits on his Lord’s Day sermon for the following morning. Then, at 5:00, Bonar received some shocking news: his beloved friend Robert Murray M’Cheyne had died from typhus fever, only weeks shy of his thirtieth birthday.

Bonar did not know M’Cheyne had been sick. Days before, a letter was sent to Bonar’s residence informing him of Robert’s illness, but the document was misaddressed. Thus, Bonar recorded on that somber Saturday, “A message has just come to tell me of Robert M’Cheyne’s death. Never, never yet in all my life have I felt anything like this: It is a blow to myself, to his people, to the church of Christ in Scotland.”1

Bonar raced down to Dundee, where M’Cheyne had a famous ministry at St. Peter’s. He discovered a church almost convulsing in grief. Hundreds of congregants filled the lower gallery. Weeping and crying were heard in the street. “Such a scene of sorrow has not often been witnessed in Scotland,” Bonar reported.2 One local paper, The Witness, soon devoted numerous articles to M’Cheyne in three different editions. “His precious life was short,” one column recalled, “but he was an aged saint in Christian experience. . . . Into those few years there was compressed a life-time of ministerial usefulness.”3

For almost two centuries now, M’Cheyne’s “ministerial usefulness” has fascinated countless Christians. How is it that a young man, who served in gospel ministry for only seven years, has so captured hearts and instructed minds? How do people even come to know about M’Cheyne?

The answer is found in a book: The Memoir and Remains of Robert Murray M’Cheyne by Andrew Bonar.

Prayer-Saturated Book

Within weeks of M’Cheyne’s death, family and friends discussed the possibility of someone writing his biography. Bonar was the first nominee and most logical choice. Bonar had long possessed a literary gift, and no one had been closer to M’Cheyne since their days as students at the Divinity Hall in Edinburgh. Bonar agreed to take on the task.

Bonar began his work in September of 1843 and completed the first edition three months later. “Finished my Memoir of Robert M’Cheyne yesterday morning,” Bonar journaled on December 23, 1843. “Praise, praise to the Lord. I have been praying, ‘Guide me with Thine eye.’ I may soon be gone; but I am glad that the Lord has permitted me to finish this record of His beloved servant.”4

The Memoir was published in the spring of 1844. “The M’Cheyne Circle” of pastors, a collection of evangelical titans in the just-formed Free Church of Scotland, prayed fervently for the book. Before the book’s publication, Bonar and his friends committed to “a season of special prayer and fast to ask blessing on the Memoir, and the raising up of many holy men.”5

The Lord answered their prayers.

Popularity and Power

The Memoir was published in 1844 to near-universal acclaim. It “commanded a sale almost unprecedented in the annals of religious biography,” one newspaper stated.6 Within 25 years, the Memoir went through 116 English editions, and close to 500,000 copies were printed through the early 1900s. The book remains in print today and has been translated into multiple languages.

Bonar’s diary often remarks on correspondence received from readers of the Memoir. “Many tokens have I received of the Lord’s blessing that book,” he rejoiced.7 Bonar’s children later recalled how an unconverted curate in the Church of England received the book from his brother. The curate decided to read some of M’Cheyne’s sermons to his congregation on the Lord’s Day. He was amazed to discover his church asking questions about Christ and eternity that “they had never spoken of before.”8 God used the Memoir to convert sinners, comfort saints, and commission servants of Christ.

Charles Spurgeon held the Memoir in the highest regard, commending it to his students at the Pastor’s College as “one of the best and most profitable volumes ever published. Every minister should read it often.”9 More recently, Sinclair Ferguson has referred to the Memoir as “one of my most treasured possessions. . . . It is a book every young Christian man should read — more than once.” Joel Beeke calls it “one of the top ten books in the world.”

Profiting from the Memoir

Late in his life, Bonar traveled to America. He was surprised with the notoriety attached to him as the famed author of M’Cheyne’s life. “Filled with alarm and regret in reviewing the Lord’s mercies to me, in using me to write the Memoir of R. M. M’Cheyne, for which I’m continually received thanks from ministers,” Bonar wrote. “Why was I commissioned to write that book? How poor have been my returns of thankfulness. Oh, when shall I attain to the same holy sweetness and unction, and when shall I reach the deep fellowship with God which he used to manifest?”10

Bonar’s mention of holiness, unction, and communion with God underlines the Memoir’s typical attractions. As the title suggests, The Memoir and Remains of Robert Murray M’Cheyne consists of two parts. The book begins with Bonar’s memoir, a biography of M’Cheyne that stretches to something like 160 pages. The second part, the Remains, fills a few hundred pages with writings from M’Cheyne — sermons, letters, tracts, and hymns. Each page bursts with that grand secret of M’Cheyne’s ministry: love to Christ.

Why, then, should someone today read Bonar’s Memoir and Remains of Robert Murray M’Cheyne? Because the pages unfold and embody the apostolic heartbeat to preach earnestly “for the love of Christ” (2 Corinthians 5:14) and to “count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:8).

Read the Memoir to enter M’Cheyne’s school of piety and ministry. Read to discover what it means that “it is not great talents God blesses so much as great likeness to Jesus.”11 Read to know the power that comes from a life saturated with Scripture, one that not only tries to understand God’s word, but also “to feel it.”12 Read to remember how preaching is indeed “the grand instrument which God has put into our hands, by which sinners are to be saved, and saints fitted for glory.”13 Read to have your soul stirred from M’Cheyne’s experience of revival, that “very glorious and remarkable work of God.”14 Read to hear a thirst for holiness that prayed, “Lord, make me as holy as a pardoned sinner can be made.”15

M’Cheyne’s Christ

Finally, understand something vital. M’Cheyne once warned about people paying more attention to preachers than to the Christ they proclaimed. He used the story of Moses and the bronze serpent to illustrate his point (Numbers 21:4–9). “As I have told you before, the only use of the pole was to hold up the brazen serpent. No one thought of looking at the pole. . . . We are to hold up Jesus before you, and before ourselves too: so that we shall disappear, and nothing shall be seen but Christ.”

Read the Memoir rightly, and the real shining light you see is nothing other than the beauty and excellency of Jesus Christ.

Isaiah 6 recounts one of the most stunning revelations of God’s majesty in the Old Testament. The prophet writes, “In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of his robe filled the temple” (Isaiah 6:1). The six-winged seraphim — fiery, flying heavenly beings — call to one another with booming voices, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!” (Isaiah 6:3).

Isaiah responds to this awesome theophany with distressed confession: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” (Isaiah 6:5). One of the fiery angels touches Isaiah’s mouth with a coal from the heavenly altar to remove his guilt, and then the Lord calls and commissions his prophet. Isaiah’s initial zeal — “Here I am! Send me” (Isaiah 6:8) — turns to confusion — “How long, O Lord?” (Isaiah 6:11) — when the prophet considers his challenging charge:

Go, and say to this people: “Keep on hearing, but do not understand; keep on seeing, but do not perceive.” Make the heart of this people dull, and their ears heavy, and blind their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed. (Isaiah 6:9–10)

While Revelation 4 recalls Isaiah’s vision of the divine throne, Jesus and the apostles more frequently cite the prophet’s commission to preach to a recalcitrant people unable to hear or see spiritual truths. These verses feature prominently in all four Gospels (Matthew 13:13–15; Mark 4:12; Luke 8:10; John 12:39–41), the book of Acts (Acts 28:25–28), and even Paul’s letter to the Romans (Romans 11:8). Why? This Old Testament passage helps to explain how the rejection of Jesus and his followers fulfills the larger biblical pattern of the maligned messengers of God.

Let’s review the context of Isaiah’s prophecy and then consider Jesus’s use of this passage in Matthew 13:13–15.

Isaiah’s Startling Commission

Isaiah 1–5 establishes Judah’s chronic idolatry, hardness of heart, and lack of spiritual understanding. Though there are flickers of hope about what God will do “in the latter days” (Isaiah 2:2–5), these chapters repeatedly expose the people’s rebellion and announce God’s coming reckoning. The people are like unruly children who have despised the Holy One of Israel (Isaiah 1:2–4). In their idolatry and immorality, Judah resembles Sodom and Gomorrah, the wicked cities God destroyed with fire and brimstone (Isaiah 1:9–10). The beloved vineyard of the Lord has yielded nothing but wild grapes (Isaiah 5:1–7).

For five tense chapters, Isaiah decries their sins and warns of judgment. Then, in chapter 6, Isaiah beholds God’s glory and receives his commission to blind the people’s eyes, stop up their ears, and harden their hearts (Isaiah 6:9–13). The prophet’s preaching would not merely warn the people but would confirm them in their stubborn rebellion against God.

The biblical prophets often speak of Israel’s malfunctioning eyes and ears to illustrate their inability to respond rightly to divine revelation. This imagery reflects God’s earlier word of judgment in Deuteronomy 29:4: “To this day the Lord has not given you a heart to understand or eyes to see or ears to hear.” Moreover, pronouncements about the people’s spiritual blindness, deafness, and dullness reveal that they now resemble the lifeless idols they have revered. Psalm 115:4–8 unpacks this biblical logic:

Their idols are silver and gold,     the work of human hands.They have mouths, but do not speak;     eyes, but do not see.They have ears, but do not hear;     noses, but do not smell. . . .Those who make them become like them;     so do all who trust in them.

The same pattern is at work in the book of Isaiah. The people have chosen oaks and gardens for their pagan worship, so they “shall be like an oak whose leaf withers, and like a garden without water” (Isaiah 1:29–30). They have trusted in and treasured carved idols, so God addresses them as “deaf” and “blind” (Isaiah 42:17–18). In this case, the prophetic word brings not salvation but judgment.

God’s Maligned Messengers

Matthew, Mark, and Luke each record Jesus’s famous parable of the sower, which challenges people to consider their response to God’s word proclaimed by God’s Son. The challenge is most clear in Mark’s account, which begins with the command “Listen!” (Mark 4:3). Jesus concludes the parable with this enigmatic exhortation: “He who has ears, let him hear” (Matthew 13:9). He repeats the word “hear” five times when explaining this parable (Matthew 13:18–23). The seed sown on good soil illustrates “the one who hears the word and understands it. He indeed bears fruit” (Matthew 13:23). The point is that Jesus’s teaching about the kingdom demands a response of obedience. True hearing entails bearing fruit.

Our Lord turns to Isaiah 6 to explain why he teaches in parables. His disciples are blessed because they see and understand the secrets of the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 13:11, 16–17). The crowds, however, see yet do not perceive; they hear yet do not understand the spiritual truths that Jesus teaches.

Indeed, in their case the prophecy of Isaiah is fulfilled that says: “You will indeed hear but never understand, and you will indeed see but never perceive.” For this people’s heart has grown dull, and with their ears they can barely hear, and their eyes they have closed, lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their heart and turn, and I would heal them. (Matthew 13:14–15)

“Jesus’s teaching about the kingdom demands a response of obedience. True hearing entails bearing fruit.”

Jesus cites Isaiah’s commission to clarify why his own ministry is met with opposition. Here we have the filling up of a biblical pattern, not the fulfillment of a prediction. God sent Isaiah to a recalcitrant people unable and unwilling to see, hear, and understand spiritual truths, those who had become just like the lifeless idols they admired. Isaiah’s situation reminds us of Moses, who spoke God’s word to a nation without eyes to see or ears to hear, and it also parallels the ministries of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and many other prophets who were disregarded and dishonored by their own people.

Throughout the Bible, Israel persecuted and killed the messengers sent by God, so it is unsurprising that the final prophet, the long-awaited Messiah, would receive a similar reception (see Luke 11:49–50 and Acts 7:52). Isaiah’s commission to the spiritually blind and deaf foreshadows the later and greater ministry of Jesus.

Jesus’s Superior Glory

There is also an important redemptive-historical development from Isaiah to Jesus. John 12:41 explains that Isaiah “saw his glory and spoke of him.” This means either that the prophet saw the glory of the preincarnate Messiah, who is “high and lifted up” (Isaiah 6:1), or that he foretold the exaltation of the suffering servant, who reveals God’s glory as he accomplishes God’s redemptive plan (Isaiah 52:13–53:12). In either interpretation, Jesus is not merely another messenger from God but the glorious God-in-the-flesh, “full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). He is both the fulfillment of the rejected-prophet pattern and the one foretold by the prophets.

Isaiah announces coming judgment followed by an era of salvation, when “the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped” (Isaiah 35:5). This prophecy prepares the way for the message and ministry of the Messiah Jesus. Our Lord not only preaches good news about the kingdom of heaven but also opens deaf ears and gives sight to the blind. These miracles of reversal signal that the promised time of salvation has come (Matthew 11:2–6).

These miracles also serve as enacted parables illustrating the people’s need for God to grant them the spiritual capacity to recognize Jesus as the divine Savior and Lord, and respond with faith. The blind cannot make themselves see. Nor can people apprehend spiritual truths unless God illumines his word and enables them to see and believe. This is why Jesus says to his disciples, “Blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear” (Matthew 13:16).

Look and Listen

Thus, Jesus and his followers frequently quote Isaiah 6 to explain that the opposition they face fits into a larger biblical pattern of the rejection of God’s chosen messengers. Christ fulfills this pattern as both a true prophet and the suffering servant the prophets foretold. So then, look to and listen to the Lord Jesus, the long-awaited Savior who overcomes our resistance and opens our eyes to see him as the One full of grace and truth.

Audio Transcript

We just started March, and that means we just started reading the glorious letter of Romans together — “the greatest letter that has ever been written in the history of the world by anybody, Christian or non-Christian.” That was your claim last time, Pastor John — high praise from a man who has read and studied this letter countless times over more than sixty years. Coming up this Thursday, we find ourselves reading Romans 5:10 together, and it has led a podcast listener named Bethany, an 18-year-old woman, to write in to ask this sharp question.

“Pastor John, hello, and thank you for this podcast,” she writes. “I was given the great joy and privilege of being born into a Christian home and raised by godly parents, and I went to church every Sunday. I gave a credible confession of faith very young and trusted in Christ for my salvation as long as I can remember. Add all this up, and I’m having a hard time understanding how I was God’s enemy. I know I was God’s enemy, according to Romans 5:10. I guess, what does it feel like to be God’s enemy? I’m trying to understand how he and I were opposed against one another. I know my salvation will be even more glorious if I can understand this better and feel it more deeply.”

Bethany is not alone. I’m in her situation. I have no memory of being God’s enemy. I mean, I’m 79 years old. I was saved when I was 6. I’ve been walking with Christ since then. The basic issue we face is this: Are we going to learn our true condition before Christ and outside Christ from our memory and our experience, or are we going to learn it from the word of God? Are we going to feel it because it’s in the word of God and the Spirit applies it to us? Or are we going to try to dredge up some memory that may not exist at all and try to feel that? I don’t think that’s going to work — and even if it did work, it would be inadequate.

Double Enmity

Bethany refers to Romans 5:10. That’s a good place to start. “If while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.” So, she’s right to conclude that, before conversion — whatever age — before faith in Christ, we needed to be reconciled to God because we were his enemies.

That phrase “I am his enemy” is ambiguous. It might mean “I’m angry at him” or “He’s angry at me” (or both). I think Bethany is focusing mainly on how she could feel any enmity toward God. She’s never felt any enmity toward God. Neither have I, consciously. I’ve never consciously raised my fist in God’s face, saying, “You’re my enemy” or “I’m your enemy.” So, when she says she has no memory of that, as far as she knows, she means it. And she’s never felt that way toward God. And I think she’s aware that her enmity (that she’s thinking about) toward God is only half the issue of being the enemy of God. The other half is that God has enmity toward us.

Now, she’s not talking about that directly, but she does say, “I’m trying to understand how he and I were opposed against one another.” Ah, she’s onto it, right? That’s right. The reconciliation has to go both ways, both directions, in order for us to have peace with God. He’s angry at her and me and everybody because of our sin, and we don’t like him. That’s our part — we don’t like him. We consider him an intrusion upon our self-determination and our self-exaltation. That’s our enmity toward him. So it goes both ways.

“You can only know the root of your condition outside Christ by learning it from the Bible.”

See these in the Bible so people don’t have to take my word for it. Look at the amazing connection between Romans 5:8 and Romans 5:9. It’s amazing. Romans 5:9 says, “Since . . . we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God.” Okay, so there’s enmity toward us: “saved . . . from the wrath of God.” Our biggest problem is that God is our enemy. He has enmity toward us. He has a legitimate, just, wrathful disposition toward us because we deserve his judgment as God-hostile sinners.

Now, here’s the preceding verse, Romans 5:8: “God shows his love for us . . .” Take a step back and say, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I thought he was angry.” “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” So, before the problem of our enmity toward God is overcome, while we were still his enemies, God does what must be done in order to remove his enmity toward us by sending Christ. This is what must be done. He sends his Son, Christ, who bears our punishment so that we might be forgiven and justified.

So, God unilaterally — quite apart from anything we do or say or think, or even our existence — on the cross, satisfies his own justice and wrath in the death of Christ so that there is no condemnation toward those who will believe in him.

Different by Degrees

But Bethany’s question is, What about my enmity toward God? I don’t remember ever feeling that. How should I think about it? How should I feel it?

Now, the first part of the answer is that Bethany is only different in degree from the person who was saved at age 35, having had illicit sex over and over, been in jail, done drugs and every other manner of evil you can think of. She’s only different in degree as to whether she or that person could feel enmity toward God.

And what I mean is that that person, looking back, knows a little bit of how bad sin is and what their condition was and would be outside Christ. But the memory of all those outward acts and even the impulses that caused them does not go to the root of the matter. You can only know the root of your condition outside Christ by learning it from the Bible. God must reveal to us the nature and the depth of our corruption and our sinfulness and our enmity to God. Experience can only take us so far, but not far enough.

Now, Bethany surely has been tempted to sin. I assume she’s a human being, right? She has been tempted to sin, and she can imagine some of what her corruption would be like if she gave in to it repeatedly. And that person who was saved at age 35 has a clear sense of what sin is like. But it’s only a matter of degree that separates them because neither of them — none of us — knows the depth of our condition if we don’t learn it from God in the Bible.

Seeing Ourselves in Scripture

Since I think Bethany and I have basically the same issue — namely, a Christian background in which we don’t have any memory of being enemies of God consciously — let me use myself as an example of how I gain and feel a true conception of my condition before I was a believer (say, at age 4 or 5 years old) and what I would be now (at age 79) without Christ in my life. Here’s what I do: I immerse myself in what God says I was, what God says I would be outside Christ. I make the touchstone of my identity outside Christ God’s word, not my memory.

For example, here’s what I preach to myself. Romans 3:9–11: “Both Jews and Greeks are under sin, as it is written: ‘None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God.’” That’s me: no understanding, no seeking, no desire, no righteousness, under the dominion of sin. That’s me. And I meditate on that.

What is that? What does it look like? What is sin? Romans 1:22–23: “Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images.” They exchanged God for images. Romans 1:28: “Since they did not [approve of having God in their knowledge], God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.” Sin is exchanging God for the treasures I prefer rather than God. I prefer to eat of the tree of the garden of Eden. I prefer my way toward money, my way toward power, my way toward fame, my way toward sex, and God is in the way. I don’t like it. I want him out of the way. I want to do what I want to do. That’s sin. I don’t want to be subordinate to any authority outside myself.

That’s what Paul means by enmity toward God. And all of us can feel it crouching at the door. Without the Holy Spirit in Christ, it would take over. That’s me apart from sovereign grace.

What about Romans 8:7? What it adds is that, without Christ, I’m a slave to my arrogance; I’m a slave to my self-determination, my self-exaltation. It says, “The mind [of] the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God’s law; indeed, it cannot.” And that word cannot is crucial. My condition, apart from sovereign grace, God’s work in my life, is not just that I don’t please God or even that I don’t want to please God, but that my not wanting to please God is so deep I cannot please God. That’s my condition.

Word over Experience

We can only learn that because God reveals it to us in the Bible, not from experience — whether you were saved at 6 or saved at 60. So, Bethany, we’re all in this together. Whoever we are as Christians, we are all seeking to know who God is, what grace is, who we were and would be without him, and what we are by grace. And we can only know these things rightly, deeply, not because of our memory or our experience, but because of God’s word.