We felt safe with Seth.

I was 16 years old, in tenth grade — right in the middle of those promising and perilous teenage years — when he came to our church as the new youth minister. I was surrounded by the pressures and confusion of adolescence, and yet Seth Buckley brought a clarifying, stabilizing presence. He embodied mature Christian manhood, with both strength and gentleness.

None could question his physical strength. He had played linebacker at Alabama, and he could squat and bench far more than any of us high-school athletes. Yet he played the guitar and sang solos. And his tender heart for Jesus, and teenagers, came through, often with tears, in heartfelt rehearsals of the gospel every Wednesday night.

The reason we felt safe with Seth wasn’t because he was weak. He emphatically was not. He was strong — both physically and emotionally. And he was gentle. That is, he knew how to use his strength to life-giving ends. To the gift of his strength, he had added the virtue of gentleness.

Neither effeminate nor brutish, neither soft nor violent, Seth modeled for us teenaged men-in-training the kind of men we wanted to be deep down — the kind of men the gospel produces over time. In this way, knowing Seth helps me imagine what it may have been like to know King David.

Expert in War

We might remember David as “the sweet psalmist of Israel” (2 Samuel 23:1) and forget he was first a fearless, strong, and skilled man of war. But a striking scene at the end of his life gives a fuller picture of David than the simple singer-songwriter. When David’s son Absalom rebels against his father, marches on Jerusalem, and sends David momentarily retreating, David’s friend Hushai plays loyal to Absalom in order to defeat the rebel counsel. As he makes his case (which carries the day), he characterizes David, in terms that all agreed with:

You know that your father and his men are mighty men, and that they are enraged, like a bear robbed of her cubs in the field. Besides, your father is expert in war. (2 Samuel 17:8)

Not just his men, but David himself is mighty — and expert in war. And this wasn’t new. When we first meet David (even before Goliath), he is introduced as “a man of valor, a man of war”:

Behold, I have seen a son of Jesse the Bethlehemite, who is skillful in playing, a man of valor, a man of war, prudent in speech, and a man of good presence, and the Lord is with him. (1 Samuel 16:18)

In the following chapter, the Goliath account, we learn that David has already killed lions and bears (1 Samuel 17:34–36). He has the courage to face the giant, and the skill to conquer him. And though still a youth, David is strong enough to take Goliath’s massive sword, draw it from its sheath, and take off the giant’s head (1 Samuel 17:51). Soon the imposing Saul, who stood head and shoulders above the rest, would hear his people singing of David’s strength: “Saul has struck down his thousands, and David his ten thousands” (1 Samuel 18:7).

What Made Him Great?

Psalm 18, which David wrote in praise of God’s lifelong deliverance, celebrates the physical strength and ability that God had given and honed in his anointed. David “can run against a troop” and “leap over a wall” (Psalm 18:29); he says that God “equipped me with strength” (Psalm 18:39) and “made my feet like the feet of a deer” (Psalm 18:33). God “trains my hands for war,” making his arms strong enough to “bend a bow of bronze” (Psalm 18:34). And yet, right here, in mention after mention of his human strength, David celebrates the surpassing quality of gentleness. Strength and skill may have made him a good warrior and king, but “Your gentleness,” he says to God, “made me great” (Psalm 18:35).

“Both strong and gentle, David knows when to wield his strength and when to walk in gentleness.”

Strength, valor, and experience made David “expert in war,” but it was God’s own gentleness (which David learned firsthand) that made David great. Not only had the omnipotent God been gentle with his Anointed, in his finitude and many failings, but God’s gentleness had come to characterize David’s own leadership. As Derek Kidner comments, “While it was the gentleness God exercised that allowed David his success, it was the gentleness God taught him that was his true greatness” (Psalms, 95).

Where do we see this greatness? When did David add the surpassing virtue of gentleness to the valuable ability of his strength? Psalm 18 appears in 2 Samuel 22 at the culmination of the book, and two key mentions of David’s gentleness earlier in the story set up this climactic line and lesson.

Gentle with an Enemy

After the death of Saul, David’s commander, Joab, avenges the personal loss of his own brother. Saul’s commander, Abner, had struck down Joab’s brother, Asahel, after he had pursued Abner after battle. Abner had warned him to turn aside, and Asahel would not, and Abner struck him in the stomach. “A long war between the house of Saul and the house of David” followed, with David growing “stronger and stronger, while the house of Saul became weaker and weaker” (2 Samuel 3:1).

In time, Abner sought peace with David and delivered the rest of the kingdom to David. They feasted together, and David sent Abner away in peace. But Joab then drew Abner aside (under the pretense of peace) “to speak with him privately, and there he struck him in the stomach, so that he died, for the blood of Asahel his brother” (2 Samuel 3:27). The contrast between David and Joab is stark and pronounced. Both can be fearsome in battle. Both are strong, brave, and experts of war. But Joab, while an asset in war, is a liability in peace.

Joab’s unrighteous killing of Abner threatens the consolidation of the nation under David’s rule. So, David publicly mourns the death of Abner so that “all the people and all Israel understood that day that it had not been the king’s will to put to death Abner” (2 Samuel 3:37). David speaks to his servants to make clear his differences from Joab, the son of Zeruiah:

Do you not know that a prince and a great man has fallen this day in Israel? And I was gentle today, though anointed king. These men, the sons of Zeruiah, are more severe than I. The Lord repay the evildoer according to his wickedness! (2 Samuel 3:38–39)

Gentle with a Traitor

Second, near the end of David’s reign, when Absalom has rebelled against him, David sends Joab and the army out against Absalom, but with specific instructions. In keeping with his pattern of exercising strength, and adding to it the virtue of gentleness, David orders Joab, in the presence of many witnesses, “Deal gently for my sake with the young man Absalom” (2 Samuel 18:5).

Some commentators see weakness and indiscretion in David at this point; others see the gentleness that made him great. Peter Leithart comments,

These instructions were consistent with David’s treatment of all his enemies; he had treated Saul well, and just recently he had restrained Abishai from cutting down Shimei. He knew what Joab was capable of, and he wanted all his men to know that he treated enemies with kindness and compassion. David’s behavior again provided an Old Testament illustration of Jesus’s teaching about loving enemies. (A Son to Me, 278)

Joab, of course, defies David’s will and kills Absalom, again accenting the difference between the two men. Both are strong, but only one is great — and that through his gentleness.

Joab is the one-dimensional man of war — strong, tenacious, courageous in battle, a hero in combat. Yet his manhood is immature and incomplete. A liability at home and in peacetime, Joab is unable to cushion his strength and control his tenacity.

David, on the other hand, in masculine maturity, has learned gentleness and can thrive in all contexts. His abilities are multidimensional. He can lead a nation, not only an army. Both strong and gentle, he knows when to wield his strength and when, with admirable restraint, to walk in gentleness.

High and Exalted, Gentle and Lowly

In showing teenaged boys the strength and gentleness of mature masculinity, Seth showed us far more than the greatness of King David. While Psalm 18 gives tribute to God’s work in and through David, there is much in the psalm, writes John Calvin, that “agrees better with Christ” than with David.

“Gentleness is not the absence of strength but the addition of virtue.”

When the apostle John, on the isle of Patmos, caught his glimpses of the glory of Christ, he witnessed the paragon of mature masculinity, complete in power and grace. In Jesus, he saw not only man but “the Almighty” (Revelation 1:8). “His voice was like the roar of many waters,” and his face “like the sun shining in full strength” (Revelation 1:15–16). Later John would see this Lion of a man, sitting on a white horse, as the one who “judges and makes war” (Revelation 19:11).

From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron. He will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty. (Revelation 19:15)

Yet when the apostle looked between the angels and the throne of heaven, he “saw a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain” (Revelation 5:6). A lamb-like Lion, and lion-like Lamb, awe-inspiring in his majestic strength, and yet seen to be truly great as the atoning sacrifice for the sins of his people.

Jesus’s gentleness cushions the application of his great power as he marshals it in the service of his weak people. Do not mistake his gentleness for weakness. Gentle is not code for weak. Gentleness is not the absence of strength but the addition of virtue to strength — in men like Seth, King David, and most admirably of all, the Son of God himself.

Lightning can be majestic. That is, from a safe distance. Or from a secure shelter that frees us from the threat of electrocution, and allows us to enjoy the spectacular show.

The concept of majesty first brings to mind great sights, like distant lightning. Whether it’s a scenic vista of purple mountain majesties, the skyline of a great city, the dazzling beauty of gold or precious jewels, or the grandeur of a royal palace and its decorum, we typically associate the noun majesty, and its adjective majestic, with stunning glimpses, panoramas, and sights.

Majesty captures a greatness, power, and glory that is both impressive and attractive. And as with lightning, what is majestic from a safe distance can be terrifying when right overhead, without shelter. And so it is when the living God showcases his majesty at the Red Sea — his enemies panic with fear (Exodus 14:24), while his people, whom he rescues, know themselves safe and praise his majesty:

In the greatness of your majesty you overthrow your adversaries;     you send out your fury; it consumes them like stubble. . . .     Who is like you, majestic in holiness,     awesome in glorious deeds, doing wonders? (Exodus 15:7, 11)

Yet when Scripture mentions the majesty of God, the reference is not exclusively to the visible. Thunder, not only lightning, also may strike us as majestic, when we don’t find ourselves exposed and at risk. And so, as Scripture testifies, God’s voice is majestic.

His words ring out with divine greatness, and tangible goodness, in the ears of his people. His speech is both authoritative and appealing, imposing and attractive. His voice both cuts us to the heart, and makes our hearts thrill. His words wound us in our sin, and we welcome it in the Spirit. God’s majestic words, spoken and written, surprise and delight his people, even as his enemies cower at his thunderings. Their fear is terror; ours is reverent awe and joy.

His lightnings enthrall his saints. As does the thunder of his words.

Greatness of His Word

Consider, first, the greatness of “his majestic voice” (Isaiah 30:30).

“No voice speaks with such authority — or remotely close to such authority — as the voice of the living God.”

No voice speaks with such authority — or anywhere even remotely close to such authority — as the voice of the living God. His words, unlike any other words, are utterly authoritative, and on every possible subject he chooses to address. Like no other mind and mouth, his words are not limited to an area of expertise. His expertise, as God, is all things, without exception.

But the greatness of his word includes not only his right to speak on any given subject (and every subject), but also his ability to speak to the most important subjects and do so extensively, and perfectly, and have the final say. He not only takes up far-reaching, bottomless, eternal, truly great topics, but he never speaks above his head, or out of his depths, as even the world’s greatest minds do when they come to the topics that matter most.

God never speculates. He never overreaches or overextends his knowledge. He never over-speaks. As God, he may publicly address any subject matter he chooses, and with unassailable authority, and he does so perfectly, every time, in all he chooses to say and not say.

In Scripture, he does give us an extensive word, but not an exhaustive one. He chooses to limit his spoken revelation to a first covenant and then a new one, 66 books, and 30,000 verses across the span of a millennium and a half. However, he chooses not (yet) to speak to every possible subject in his created world and beyond, but to speak with both clarity and repetition, despite the trends and undulations of every generation, to the realities that are most timeless and essential. And in doing so, he cues his people in on the subjects and proportions of his focus that prove most important in every time and season.

Power of His Word

Ponder also the power of his majestic voice. His divine speech is not only authoritative on every subject but indomitably effective in accomplishing every purpose he intends. His words do not return to him empty, but effect, every time, precisely what he purposes (Isaiah 55:11).

“God has the ability to do exactly what he says — and to do it simply by saying it.”

Like no other being in the universe, God has the ability to do exactly what he says — and to do so simply by saying it. “Let there be light,” he says, and without delay or uncertainty, there is light. And he keeps the world he made in existence — he upholds it — says Hebrews 1:3, “by his powerful word.” And when he chooses, he speaks into the deaf hearts of “those who are perishing” — those whose spiritual sight has been blinded by “the god of this world” — and he says, “Let light shine out of darkness.” At that moment, dead hearts begin to beat. Deaf ears hear, and blind eyes see the light of his gospel. They believe and are saved (2 Corinthians 4:3–6).

Well did Martin Luther, author of “A Mighty Fortress,” marvel at the majesty of the divine voice when he wrote that we tremble not for the prince of darkness — because “one little word shall fell him.” According to John’s Apocalypse, the God-man, with his risen, glorified, human mouth will speak the decisive, effective word in the end. On the isle of Patmos, John first heard “a loud voice like a trumpet” (Revelation 1:10), and turned to see — among the visible majesties of Christ’s robe, sash, hair, eyes, feet, and face — that “from his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword,” and “his voice was like the roar of many waters” (Revelation 1:15–16). With no weapon in hand, but fully armed with the power of his perfectly effective word, Christ will defeat his enemies, making “war against them with the sword of my mouth” (Revelation 2:16).

From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. . . . And the rest [those who had received the mark of the beast] were slain by the sword that came from the mouth of him who was sitting on the horse. (Revelation 19:15, 21)

The day fast approaches when the risen Christ, as the divine-human mouthpiece of the Godhead, will have only to speak and fell the devil and his hordes with one majestic word from his mouth.

Glory of His Word

Finally, consider the glory of his majestic voice. Even more than greatness and power, glory comes closest to the heart of what majesty signals.

Majesty is typically emotive. It’s the worshiper’s word of choice, not the scientist’s. Applied to God’s word, his majesty relates to the moral beauty of his speech. The divine voice is not only great in volume and pitch but good in the ears of his people; not only powerful but wonderful for his church; not only true but desirable in the hearts of his saints.

More to be desired are [his words] than gold,     even much fine gold;sweeter also than honey     and drippings of the honeycomb. (Psalm 19:10)

And we note, in a fallen world like ours, and with sin-swayed palates like ours, the divine glory often comes with unexpected or peculiar majesty. His majestic voice rarely speaks as human ears anticipate. With our own short-sighted and sin-shaped notions of what a glorious voice will say, we find ourselves startled again and again by Scripture. Here, in the words of God, we find a majesty, a glory, that does not meet our eyes and ears like the world and sin have taught us to expect. His voice rings out with a distinctly divine glory, a peculiar majesty, that far outstrips our small assumptions.

His majestic voice upstages the wisdom of the world, and unnerves the scribes and debaters of this age. It arrests the wise, powerful, and nobly born according to worldly standards. It shames the world’s wise and strong, while exalting the low and despised (1 Corinthians 1:20, 26–28). As the Bible’s great meditation on divine majesty, Psalm 8, celebrates,

     Out of the mouth of babies and infants,you have established strength because of your foes,     to still the enemy and the avenger. (Psalm 8:2)

The one who “set [his] glory above the heavens” (Psalm 8:1) puts his peculiar majesty on display — or makes his majesty audible — in the mouths of the weakest, even babes and infants. And in such peculiar majesty, God’s people hear an undeniably self-authenticating glory: this voice is indeed God’s, not man’s. Humans may forge swords and devise missiles. They may construct towers and adorn palaces. But the Majesty on High will bring them down with the praise of children.

Victory of His Word

So we hear that when God himself came to dwell among us, “the Word became flesh” (John 1:14). He did not come with the majesty man expected. The Word came to Nazareth, to a virgin, to thirty years in obscurity, with “no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him” (Isaiah 53:2). That is, no majesty for the eyes and ears of natural man.

But when God opens our eyes, and ears, we encounter his majesty. We hang on his words, as some did when he taught in the temple (Luke 19:48), and we testify in awe, with those officers who confessed, “No one ever spoke like this man!” (John 7:46). We say with the crowds in Galilee, Finally, a teacher with real authority! (Mark 1:22, 27). And we anticipate the day when he will smite our foes with the sword of his mouth, even as we his church praise him, with the tribute of Psalm 45:2, “grace is poured upon your lips.”

Then we will see even more of the majesty of his lightning, that comes with his thunderous word.

The curious man came at night, under the cloak of darkness.

By and large, the masses may have been missing the significance of Jesus’s miracles, but Nicodemus, a Pharisee and “ruler of the Jews,” was catching on. “No one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him,” he recognized. He was beginning to understand. These visible signs Jesus performed were designed to open ears to the words he spoke. “You are a teacher come from God” (John 3:2).

Now, the great teacher stunned him with a doctrine the learned Pharisee could have known from his own Hebrew Scriptures: “Unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3). Regeneration or new birth, we call it. Physical, human birth, “of water,” is not enough to see Jesus’s kingdom. You need spiritual birth, to be “born of the Spirit”:

unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. (John 3:5–6)

Long before born-again became a popular adjective, Jesus called for new birth in this famous late-night encounter. Not many of us today will be as stumped as Nicodemus was that night, but we may still scratch our heads, especially those of us who call ourselves “Reformed” and (rightly) take so many of our theological cues from Paul’s letter to the Romans.

Romans and the Reformed Road

In broad strokes, Romans moves from human depravity (1:18–3:20), to the wonder of justification by faith alone (3:21–5:21), to the everyday experience of the Christian life and the lifelong process of sanctification by the Spirit (6:1–8:39). The famous “golden chain” of Romans 8:29–30 lays out the marvelous, unbroken sequence of God’s care for his chosen people from eternity past to eternity future:

those whom he foreknew he also predestined . . . . And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.

Foreknowledge, predestination, effectual calling, justification, and glorification — and we may pause to ask about sanctification. But in Nicodemus-like fashion, might we forget to even ask about regeneration?

As J.I. Packer wrote in 2009, “Regeneration, or new birth, meaning simply the new you through, with, in, and under Christ, is a largely neglected theme today.” That neglect, says D.A. Carson, may have been “owing in part to several decades of dispute over justification and how a person is set right with God.” Carson continues,

We have tended to neglect another component of conversion no less important. Conversion under the terms of the new covenant is more than a matter of position and status in Christ, though never less: it includes miraculous Spirit-given transformation, something immeasurably beyond mere human resolution. It is new birth; it makes us new creatures; it demonstrates that the gospel is the power of God unto salvation. All the creedal orthodoxy in the world cannot replace it.

How then does regeneration relate to our often-rehearsed “order of salvation” (Latin ordo salutis), which lays out the precious array of saving graces that are ours in Christ? How do we who love the Reformed emphasis on justification (and sanctification) think about the essential grace of the new birth, with the balance and health it brings to the whole of our theology?

New Life in the Soul

First of all, we don’t blame Paul if regeneration occupies too small a place in our thinking. After all, we clearly find the concept of new, God-given spiritual life elsewhere in his letters.

In his greatly celebrated lines to the Ephesians, he moves from human depravity (2:1–3) to God himself taking the initiative to “ma[k]e us alive together with Christ” (2:4–5), which then issues in the faith (2:8) through which Christ’s people are saved. And memorably in 2 Corinthians 5:17, Paul exclaims, literally, “If anyone is in Christ — new creation!” Paul also rehearses this new creation in us in Galatians 6:15 and in “the washing of regeneration” in Titus 3:5.

Elsewhere in the New Testament, James draws on new-birth imagery in saying of believers that God, of his own will, “brought us forth by the word of truth” (James 1:18). Peter too, echoing the accent on divine initiative, praises God the Father as the one who “has caused us to be born again” (1 Peter 1:3). Like James, Peter also mentions the eye-opening word, the gospel, through which God works: “You have been born again, not of perishable seed but of imperishable, through the living and abiding word of God” (1 Peter 1:23).

“We experience regeneration as we come to life, spiritually, and have faith in Jesus.”

This “new birth” — essential, as Jesus says, to seeing his kingdom — comes through the action of the Spirit, working with and through the gospel word. It is not self-wrought, or merely cerebral, or even temporary. And unlike foreknowledge and predestination, the new birth happens in us. We experience it as we come to life, spiritually, and have faith in Jesus. Regeneration is God’s initiative and decisive work, and yet we participate in it, as our once-dead spirit revives and we believe.

No Lapse in Time

Addressing the topic of regeneration as it relates to justification and sanctification, we learn to recognize various kinds of order in the order of salvation. Foreknowledge and predestination clearly occur prior to the application, in time, of God’s saving grace to his elect through faith. Here we might speak of temporal order in a way we would not in distinguishing among the bounty of graces later applied to the sinner through faith (justification, adoption, sanctification, and glorification).

Fresh emphasis on regeneration can be instructive because the new birth, in particular, focuses on the reality of God’s initiative and work in giving new spiritual life to the soul, which issues immediately and instantaneously in faith. In other words, there is no time lapse between God’s regenerating work and our experience of faith. It’s like opening an eye. No time lapses between the lid parting and light streaming in.

Yet there is a logical order to salvation, simultaneous as the actions may be. Opening the eye “causes” the light to stream in. Anthony Hoekema calls this “causal priority”:

When a person receives new spiritual life, he or she immediately begins to believe. Perhaps the best way to put it is to affirm that regeneration has causal priority over the other aspects of the process of salvation: faith, repentance, sanctification, and the like. . . . It is to be understood that these aspects of the process of salvation occur not successively but simultaneously. Though regeneration has causal priority over the other aspects, it has no chronological priority. (Saved by Grace, 14, 17)

God’s Initiative

Hoekema’s observation accents the special place of regeneration as being the work of God that immediately brings about the faith in us through which the full treasury of Christ’s blessings comes to us.

“Naturally, we may have been able to believe, but morally, in our depravity, we were utterly unable.”

Regeneration serves an essential function because we are born in sin, physically alive but spiritually dead (Ephesians 2:1, 5). Naturally, we may have been able to believe (no physical obstacles), but morally, in our depravity, we were utterly unable. In the new birth, God acts to make us alive (Ephesians 2:5); he gives life to the dead heart and calls into existence the saving faith that did not exist until his call. He acts in the new birth to enable (and assure) our acting in faith.

With this in view, 1 John 5:1 says, “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the Father loves whoever has been born of him.” Father here is not the typical Greek word for father (patēr) but “the Begetter” (“the one who begot,” ton gennēsanta). Believers receive new spiritual life from God the Father who gives life through the gospel of God the Son, by the work of God the Spirit. And this new birth shifts our loves: first, for our Begetter himself, and then for all whom he has begotten. The heart of regeneration is a new heart that delights in our Father and his Son, and loves our brothers and sisters in him.

Our Awakening

With regeneration, then, we also recognize the special place of faith. God’s work in the new birth produces (again, with no time lapse) our experience of saving faith, and saving faith serves as the instrument of our receiving God’s bounty of grace in Christ through the Spirit.

This connection between regeneration and saving faith, as simultaneous cause and effect, contributes to an understanding of what saving faith is (and is not). In other words, the nature of new birth determines the nature of saving faith. According to John Piper, “The very nature of the new birth that causes the sight of the treasure of Christ determines the nature of the faith it creates — namely, a treasuring of the treasure of the glory of Christ.” Therefore, “A shift of loves is at the root of saving faith.” God causes us to be born again, and we participate in the new birth by receiving Christ with joy, not with apathy or indifference.

Such faith unites us to Christ and is the occasion for his bounty of benefits becoming ours both instantaneously and progressively, both reckoned immediately and realized over time. The treasury of graces — justification, adoption, sanctification, glorification, and more — is applied to us with both already and not-yet aspects, in various ways in the differing graces.

Jesus’s Honor

So, God’s initiative of regeneration issues in our saving faith and brings us into union with the Son, in whom we experience the already and eternal cascading of divine grace to his glory.

As we pull apart and trace these threads of salvation, Sinclair Ferguson cautions us that “the traditional ordo salutis runs the danger of displacing Christ from the central place in soteriology” (The Holy Spirit, 99). Each aspect of saving grace was not only secured by Christ, but comes to us only in living relationship with him. Each grace is first true of the God-man, and then communicated to us in union with him by faith.

Jesus is “the righteous” (1 John 2:1) in whom we are justified, and will be publicly vindicated. He is “the Holy One” (1 John 2:20; Revelation 3:7; 16:5) in whom we are holy in status and become holy in practice. He is the Beloved and uniquely begotten Son (John 1:14; 3:16, 18; 1 John 4:9), in whom we received adoption as sons and will come into greater fullness. And he is the glorious one in whom we receive degrees of glory now and have the promise of full glory to come. And so, says Ferguson, “We cannot think of, or enjoy, the blessings of the gospel either isolated from each other or separated from the Benefactor himself” (102).

It was Christ himself who told Nicodemus, and us, “You must be born again.” And when the Father acts, by the Spirit, through the gospel of his Son, to open the eyes of our hearts and delight in him, he is greatly magnified in the saving of sinners.

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.

Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. (Ephesians 6:4)

Following the negative charge to fathers — “do not provoke your children to anger” — Paul captures a positive vision for Christian parenting with two key terms: “discipline and instruction” in the ESV. The Greek words beneath them have been the subject of much discussion and have led to a variety of translations. We might capture the meaning just as well, if not better, with training and counsel — which might help both our clarity of vision and practical application in parenting.

The first concept, “discipline” or “training” (paideia), is the broader and more comprehensive of the two. It likely speaks to the full educational process from infant to adult, and the years of intentionality, initiative, energy, and follow-through it takes to train a child for adulthood. That is, it is a long-term process, like training for the Olympics, but with far more at stake.

We might think of it as whole-life training — body and soul — not mere classroom instruction. “The term paideia,” comments S.M. Baugh, “has rich cultural associations in the Greek world for the training and education of youths in a wide range of subjects and disciplines” (Ephesians, 509–10). This kind of fatherly training, then, involves not only words, but example and imitation.

Training Toward Maturity

Such comprehensive life-training is what Moses received when he was “instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians,” making him, in time, “mighty in his words and deeds” (Acts 7:22). It’s what Paul received, for years, as he was brought up in Tarsus, “educated at the feet of Gamaliel” (Acts 22:3). Such whole-life training, as extended preparation for healthy adulthood, is our calling as Christian parents, training both the outer person and behaviors as well as pressing through to the heart to form and re-form the inner persons of our children.

“Maturity, after all, in any sphere of human life, typically does not come automatically, but through training.”

As Jesus spoke about his disciples being trained during their time with him (Matthew 13:52; Luke 6:40), so we disciple our children toward Christian maturity. Maturity, after all, in any sphere of human life, typically does not come automatically, but through training (Hebrews 5:14). Discipling does something; it changes the disciple — and greatly so over time. And such training is often not easy but requires persisting in moments of discomfort, even pain, to endure on the path toward the reward set before us (Hebrews 12:11).

Work ethic, for instance, is not automatic; we must teach our children to work. Nor does holiness come naturally, but God’s grace in Christ trains us, and our children through us, “to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives” (Titus 2:12).

Well-Equipped to Train Well

We might be so quick to disclaim the proverbial nature of that famous childrearing verse that we neglect to pause and really ponder what training involves. “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6). There may be far more to training — both with the body, and with the more pliable soul — than modern parents tend to recognize.

And our God has made sure that we as parents are amply supplied and fully resourced for these extensive years of training our children: he gave us his Book. At the heart and center of parental training is not our own life experience and acquired wisdom (valuable as that is), but the Scriptures, “breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16–17).

This training doubtless includes what we might more narrowly call discipline (Hebrews 12:3–11), even as we note well the difference between discipline toward a goal and punishment as an end (1 Corinthians 11:32; 2 Corinthians 6:9; 1 Timothy 1:20; 2 Timothy 2:25; Revelation 3:19). Yet the whole process of parental training is comprehensive and constructive, not only responsive; and holistic, not only intellectual.

Specific Verbal Training

The second concept, then, translated “instruction” — or perhaps “counsel” (nouthesia) — is more specific, and included under the broader category of training.

With this second term, the accent is verbal, and less hands-on — specifically about the role of our words as parents. Now we move beyond visionary teaching and demonstration to corrective speech, but still as a means to the child’s long-term good, not as an end. This is how we often use the word counsel today, though not without the sense of “admonishing” or “warning.” And parental counsel typically endures beyond the years of immediate training. Parenting doesn’t end when our children move out of the house. Parental training, at that point, may be essentially complete, but parental counsel, we hope, will long endure.

Such counsel in the New Testament covers a range of circumstances, whether the more positive counsel that Old Testament examples provide for Christians today (“they were written down for our instruction, 1 Corinthians 10:11), or the more negative warnings we extend to “a person who stirs up division” (Titus 3:10). On the whole, we do well to remember the kind of father’s heart — slow to chide and swift to bless — from which such warnings and admonitions issue.

Consider, then, at least five realities that will accompany godly counsel.

Friends of Fatherly Counsel

The first friends of fatherly counsel are our tears. On the beach at Miletus, when Paul bids farewell to the Ephesian elders, he reminds them that “for three years I did not cease night or day to admonish every one with tears” (Acts 20:31). His apostolic counsel came with tears, not vindictiveness. He did not speak critically, from an angry or distant heart, but in love he spoke his words of correction for their good.

Second, and related, is a good heart. He says to the Romans that he’s confident that they are “able to instruct one another,” because “you, my brothers, . . . are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge” (Romans 15:14). Fullness of both knowledge and goodness coexists in a heart that offers such counsel. It is from such a good heart that our children need our counsel and warnings.

Third, fatherly love. When Paul spoke hard words, as he did to the Corinthians, he did so not “to make you ashamed, but to admonish you as my beloved children.” The reason he gives is his fatherly heart for them: “For though you have countless guides in Christ, you do not have many fathers” (1 Corinthians 4:14–15). General counsel and admonitions may have their place; but our children have special need of corrective words that flow from a father’s peculiar love.

Fourth, teaching and wisdom. Twice Colossians speaks of “warning everyone” and “admonishing one another” (that is, Christian counsel) that is both paired with teaching and accompanied with “all wisdom”:

Him we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ. . . . Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. (Colossians 1:28; 3:16)

As parents, we might also observe here the goal of our parenting (Christian maturity), the essential means of our calling (the word of Christ), and the correlation with singing (joy made audible) and thankfulness. Singing, thankful fathers make for good counselors, who both correct and give hope.

Finally, brotherly warning. In 2 Thessalonians 3:15, Paul contrasts the disregard one might have for an enemy with the kind of warning counsel of a brother. And in 1 Thessalonians 5:12–14, this warning counsel is again the kind of speech characteristic of a congregation’s loving fathers — that is, its pastor-elders (verse 12) — and is deserving of the church’s esteem (verse 13). Such warning keeps company with encouraging, helping, and patience (verse 14).

Making Fathering Christian

In Paul’s one-verse vision of parenting, he finishes with one final phrase that is no throwaway. In our efforts at fatherly training and counsel, we dare not ignore it. In fact, this last note is the most important one of all. All our years of training, and all our hard and precious words of counsel, will be for naught in view of eternity without the finishing touch: “of the Lord.”

“Christian parenting aims, in everything, to teach our children Christ.”

Christian parenting aims far higher than competent, seemingly healthy adults. Christian parenting aims, in everything, to teach our children Christ. We want them to “learn Christ.” Which fits with the way Paul warns the church in Ephesians 4:20–21: “That is not the way you learned Christ! — assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus.”

In Christ, we want all our parenting covered by the banner of teaching them Christ. As Charles Hodge comments on Ephesians 6:4, “This whole process of education is to be religious, and not only religious but Christian” (Ephesians, 204). Our parental training is training in Christ. And our parental counsel, however encouraging or corrective, is counsel in Christ. In him, and through him, and for him is all Christian parenting.

As we nourish our children in the training and counsel of our Lord, we make knowing and enjoying him the final focus of our efforts. As we do, we get to be instruments in his hands, and mouthpieces of his words, in his cause for the deep and eternally enduring joy of our children.

Just a small-town girl, livin’ in a lonely world . . .

I suspect most of us have heard the 1981 song, by the band Journey, called “Don’t Stop Believin’.” It came into a second life around 2007, and for the last fifteen years it has reached a level of popularity it didn’t first have.

The song has a memorable tune, which makes the main line, “Don’t stop believin’” (which doesn’t come till the last minute), seem so powerful. Yet if you analyze the words — as a pastor who likes classic rock might be prone to do — you find out how disappointing and thin the lyrics are. For one, “Don’t stop believing” in what? What’s the object of belief?

The story behind the song is that one band member “went to the band with the iconic line ‘Don’t stop believin’; hold on to that feeling’ with the vague idea that Steve Perry [the voice] would want to sing it. Perry loved it,” reports one site, “and the band went on to improvise and jam until they had dialed in a workable version of the song.”

A sidenote about the line “Just a city boy, born and raised in South Detroit”: If you look at a map, you can see that “South Detroit” is what the Canadians call Ontario. Perry thought “South Detroit” sounded good, and he didn’t realize until years later that it didn’t exist.

Four Truths about True Faith

I mention “Don’t Stop Believin’” because that would be a fair summary of the exhortation sections of Hebrews — except that Hebrews makes the object of faith very clear. We’ve talked about how Hebrews alternates between exposition and exhortation. A summary of the expositions, we’ve said, would be “Jesus is better.” A summary of the exhortations, cast negatively, might be “Don’t stop believing in Jesus.” Or to put it positively (as in 3:1 and 12:1–3): “Look to Jesus; fix your attention on him; hold fast to him.”

“You aren’t guaranteed tomorrow, but you have today. Turn to Jesus today.”

Hebrews likes to quote from the end of Psalm 95. First, he immediately applies it to his Christian audience (3:12–19), admonishing them to this effect: “Today if you still hear God’s voice, don’t harden your hearts, but renew your faith in Jesus.” Some are drifting and in spiritual danger. You aren’t guaranteed tomorrow, but you have today. Turn to Jesus today. And as a church, be God’s means of grace in the lives of each other.

But Hebrews sees more in Psalm 95 than just the immediate exhortation. This morning we’ll see that Psalm 95 opens up a whole panorama of God’s heart and plan for his people, giving new reasons from across the Old Testament as to why it is so critical that God’s people today press afresh into Jesus.

The focus in Hebrews 4:1–11 is faith: what it is and is not, what it does, and what its object is. So we’ll look at this passage through the lens of four truths about genuine faith.

1. Faith welcomes the goodness of God, through his word.

Faith is the instrument of receiving God’s promises and benefits and entering his rest. Look at verses 2–3:

Good news came to us [Christians] just as to them [the wilderness generation that came out of Egypt], but the message they heard did not benefit them, because they were not united by faith with those who listened. For we who have believed enter that rest, as he has said,

“As I swore in my wrath,‘They shall not enter my rest.’”

We saw in 3:19 last week that “they were unable to enter because of unbelief.” That is, they did not welcome God’s promise.

Hebrews 4:2 says that “good news came to us just as to them,” which does not mean that the good news, the gospel of Jesus Christ, came to them a millennium and a half before Jesus came. It means that good news came to them in the form of God’s promise to rescue them from Egypt and to give them a land flowing with milk and honey, and they believed (Exodus 3:17; 4:31). And God brought them out of Egypt.

But when they came to the edge of the promised land, and ten spies came back with fear about the strength of the inhabitants of the land, God’s people, by and large, did not believe his promise.

Hebrews sees a parallel with us: God’s people once heard his promise (or good news), believed, and were brought out of Egypt, but later they lost faith and did not enter into his rest. So we too have heard good news — the good news about God’s divine Son coming to live among us, die for us, and rise in triumph, sitting down in the seat of honor at God’s right hand. We have heard good news and believed, but we too have not yet entered into God’s promised rest. And if we lose faith, we will not, just like them.

Which raises two questions about the nature of saving faith. First, how does faith receive God’s goodness, his good promises, his good news? Does faith receive his goodness with disgust — as in, “I think that’s true, but I don’t like it”? Of course not. Or, more telling, does faith receive his goodness with apathy? With indifference? No.

Rather, true faith, saving faith, welcomes God’s goodness as communicated in the good news. Faith receives with joy the promises of God for our good. Faith is not mere intellectual assent. It is not emotionally neutral. Faith is a function of the whole soul, including the heart.

A second question then about the nature of saving faith is the particular emphasis of this passage. What does Hebrews 4 emphasize about saving faith? Answer: genuine faith perseveres. Which leads to our second truth about genuine faith.

2. The world and the devil oppose and threaten our faith.

First, look at verse 1:

Therefore, while the promise of entering his rest still stands, let us fear lest any of you should seem to have failed to reach it.

The most common command in all the Bible might be “do not fear.” So we might think that fear, all fear, is bad. But Hebrews 4:1 says, “Let us fear,” which literally means, “May we be made to fear.” There is an important place for fear in the Christian life: the fear of facing omnipotence in our sin, without the covering of Christ through faith. We indeed should have a holy fear of God and of what it would be like if we were to give ourselves over to unbelief.

“Once saved, always saved” is easily distorted. Genuine faith does indeed persevere, and we come to know our faith to be genuine as it perseveres. Faith that fades and dies shows itself to have been false faith, and those who once seemed to have faith, but in the end no longer believe, will not enter God’s rest. Genuine faith perseveres.

“Faith that fades and dies shows itself to have been false faith.”

Which means that “losing faith” is a real threat. But it’s not a threat that happens all at once. Typically, it comes at the end of a process, often a long one. And the reason I say that “the world and the devil oppose and threaten our faith” is because of Jesus’s parable of the sower in Luke 8, where he warns of Satan, times of trial, and the cares of this life.

We’ve talked before about the general background noise in Hebrews, pushing the church to return to Judaism and just abandon the Jesus piece, which was producing trials. And chapter 4 adds an important detail about how the listeners came into this dangerous position: they had become spiritually sluggish. Their hearts had cooled and begun to harden. Their faith in Jesus was fading, not just from trials, but from the cares and riches and pleasures of life.

And when your heart is hardening and your faith is dull, threats multiply. Hebrews 13 shows us his concern for them: for failures of love, whether for the brothers, strangers, or others in need; for sexual immorality and adultery; for love for money; for their forgetting once-beloved leaders and entertaining strange and diverse teachings, different from what they had known and once firmly believed; for their beginning to see the here and now as the lasting city. The main threat in Hebrews 13 is not Jewishness but worldliness.

What makes the background noise and other temptations of Hebrew 13 live threats is waning faith, an increasingly casual attitude about Jesus, and a lack of striving to persevere. The main problem for Hebrews’s audience is not persecution from the outside but their own sin and unbelief within. Same for us today. Persecution, whether physical or just verbal, is not the greatest threat. Unbelief is the great threat. Do not fear those who only can kill the body, but let us fear lest any of us should have our hearts hardened and our faith fail.

So, how is your faith in Jesus? Is it strong, steady, thriving? Stronger today than, say, three years ago? Or is your faith embattled? Is it thin and weak? Are you just surviving and spiritually sluggish? You are not promised tomorrow, but you have today. And as verse 1 says, “The promise of entering his rest still stands.” But how is that? How does Hebrews say that the promise of rest, offered a thousand years before Jesus in Psalm 95, still stands? That leads to number 3.

3. Genuine faith strives to persevere.

First let’s look at verse 11, then we’ll come back to verses 4–8. Verse 11 says,

Let us therefore strive to enter that rest, so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience.

“That rest” that Hebrews focuses on in this chapter is, in some sense, already present for those with genuine faith, but the main referent here is future and “not yet.” Initial faith coordinates with leaving Egypt, and the rest, with entering the promised land. So then, for Christians today, the rest is “the world to come,” which we’ve already seen in Hebrews 2:5, and “the promised eternal inheritance” (9:15), and the heavenly country (11:16), and “the city that is to come” (13:14; 11:10), and the “kingdom that cannot be shaken” (12:28).

And Hebrews says, “Let us . . . strive to enter” this coming rest. “Strive” — that is, “work hard,” make every effort, apply yourself diligently. George Guthrie comments, “It speaks of focused attention toward the accomplishment of a given task” (NIV Application Commentary: Hebrews, 155). Saving faith perseveres.

But how? Very practically, if I want to keep on believing, how do I strive? How do I make every effort to persevere? Hebrews may be as clear as any single book in the Bible about three particular means of God’s ongoing grace in the Christian life for our faith surviving and thriving: God’s word, prayer, and fellowship. In other words: hearing God’s voice in his word, having his ear in prayer, and belonging to his body in the fellowship of the local church — three glorious channels of his ongoing grace around which to build habits for our striving to enter God’s rest.

But what’s in 4:1–11, leading to verses 12–16, is the particular, central place of God’s word. Look at verse 2. The phrase “the message they heard” in the ESV is literally “the word of hearing” or “the heard word.” Faith comes by hearing (Romans 10:17).

So one very practical reality for cultivating habits for striving to feed faith and enter God’s rest is, Are you hearing God’s word? Reading his word, studying his word, meditating on his word, conversing with others about his word, hearing it read and preached and discussed? Are your ears hearing, and eyes reading, enough of God’s word to feed the flame of faith in your heart?

Big Story of God’s Rest

Now, what about verses 4–8? The author makes a stunning move at the end of verse 3. After saying, “We who have believed enter that rest,” he quotes the end of Psalm 95 again: “As I swore in my wrath, ‘They shall not enter my rest.’” And then, almost as if out of left field, he adds this phrase: “although his works were finished from the foundation of the world.” And on a first reading, or twentieth perhaps, we say, “What?” Where did that come from?

Immediately following, Hebrews goes on to say “for” or “because,” which is like saying, “Let me explain.” Look at verses 4–5:

For he [God] has somewhere spoken of the seventh day in this way: “And God rested on the seventh day from all his works.” And again in this passage [that’s Psalm 95] he said, “They shall not enter my rest.”

Now, when Hebrews says God has spoken of the seventh day somewhere, he’s not saying he doesn’t remember where. He’s communicating, in an endearing way, that he and his readers know full well where God rests. We already saw Hebrews do this in 2:6, when he introduced Psalm 8. He said, “It has been testified somewhere” — not because he didn’t know where but because he knew his audience knew. There’s some holy confidence here in how strong the argument is. These are not stretches. These are well-traveled texts of Scripture.

Famously, Genesis 2:2 tells us God “rested on the seventh day from all his work.” But how does Hebrews get there? Answer: the last two words in Psalm 95, “my rest.” Which is a pretty ominous way to end a psalm: “They shall not enter my rest.” And Hebrews asks, Wait a minute, did you say God has a rest? God says, “My rest.” Where does God have a rest? Of course. So a pillar goes in place: God’s rest, day seven, at the creation of the world.

And then there’s a second pillar. This whole time, we’ve been talking about the wilderness generation that came out of Egypt with faith, and then they disobeyed on the brink of the promised land and wandered in the wilderness for forty years until that whole unbelieving generation died out. Then, after the death of Moses, Joshua led the next generation into the promised rest. That’s pillar two. These are chronological.

But then what Hebrews sees, because he’s reading his Bible very carefully, is a third pillar. Psalm 95 is the third pillar in the story, with its mention of God’s rest. And what tips him off is the word today. Four centuries after Joshua, David says in Psalm 95, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.” Look at verse 7:

Again [God] appoints a certain day, “Today,” saying through David so long afterward, in the words already quoted [Psalm 95], “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.” For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken of another day later on.

Note the time words. These are very important in Hebrews: verse 7 with “so long afterward” and verse 8 with “another day later on.” So, pillar one: God rested on the seventh day from his works. He entered into his rest. Pillar two: after the unbelieving generation died, the next generation, under Joshua, entered into the promised land. However, that’s not the end. Pillar three: Psalm 95, which is “later on” and “so long afterward,” still offers entrance into God’s rest during the time of David. And so we ask, What is that rest?

Reading Big and Small

But first, let’s just pause for a minute and consider how Hebrews reads his Bible. Learn from this. Imitate this. We might call it “reading big and small.”

Reading small: The words my rest at the end of Psalm 95 open up this whole panorama, across time, of God’s rest from creation to Joshua to David in Psalm 95, to bring his people with him into his rest. Brothers and sisters, learn to read small like this. Slow down. Linger over particular words and phrases. Read without hurry, even leisurely. Read at a pace that is conducive to understanding and meditating and enjoying — not at the pace you’ve learned to read a screen. Read slow enough to ask questions like, Where does God have a rest?

And in doing so, you’ll give your brain the precious milliseconds it takes to make connections across the sweep of Scripture. That’s reading big. Consider how concepts, captured in particular words and phrases in one place, as well as sequences and structures of thought, connect and relate to other times and places in God’s word. Reading big is seen in Hebrews’s use of chronological terms like so long afterward and another day later on.

Let’s learn to read Scripture like Hebrews does: big and small — slowly, unhurriedly, meditatively, and all the while, over time, putting together the pieces, in order, in God’s big story from beginning to end.

Now, back to the question, What is that rest for us? God’s seventh day rest, then rest in the promised land, then “the promise of entering his rest still stands” four centuries later in Psalm 95. Now what? What’s the fourth pillar for us?

A thousand years after David, one of his own descendants, and the forgotten heir to his throne, would say in the backwater streets of Galilee,

Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. (Matthew 11:28–29)

4. Saving faith rests in the person and work of Jesus.

This gives us a peek of what’s coming in Hebrews: Jesus, who is our great high priest (as we’ll see in chapters 5–7), who offers himself as the better sacrifice (chapters 9–10), is the one who gives us entrance, by faith, into God’s final rest. So, after verses 3–8 piece together the sequence from God’s rest at creation, to Moses and Joshua, to the invitation still remaining under David, he concludes in verses 9–10:

So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his.

Why does he call it a “Sabbath rest”?

This is not a reference to Jews or Christians observing a weekly Sabbath. This is upstream from that. The Jewish Sabbath was grounded in God’s creation rest and, from the beginning, anticipated the ultimate and final rest to come in Christ.

In fact, Jesus himself, seated on heaven’s throne, has finished his work and entered into God’s rest. Verse 10 might be specifically about Jesus, or perhaps carefully worded to be true of both him and us. The ESV says, “Whoever has entered God’s rest,” but a literal translation would be, “The one who has entered into his rest — even he himself rested from his works.” I can’t help but wonder.

But either way, verse 10 surely is true, at present, of Jesus and will be true, in the future, of us who persevere in faith to the end. “Sabbath rest” is Hebrews’s way of saying the true Rest, or the final Rest, or the better Rest.

“The object of our faith is not our faith. The object of our faith is Jesus.”

Finally, what does this mean for assurance? If genuine faith perseveres, and we come to know our faith to be genuine as it perseveres, and we have not yet finished our course and “rested from our works” in this life, can we have real assurance? Can we enjoy some solid measure of confidence that our faith is real, and that Jesus will hold us fast and be at work in us to endure and keep us? The answer is yes. And it relates very much to this Table, which is, among other things, a weekly corporate means of grace and assurance.

He Will Hold You Fast

How would Hebrews give us assurance? He would say, “Look to Jesus. Consider Jesus. Have faith in Jesus. Hold fast to Jesus.” In other words, what do you do with Jesus? Do you believe in him, trust him, treasure him, cling to him? Do you have faith in Jesus?

To the degree your soul leans on him, rests in him — and that your life confirms it, rather than calls it into question — you can have real, meaningful, substantial assurance. He’s working in and through you, and you can believe, “He will hold me fast, as I strive, enabled by his grace, to persevere in faith.”

The object of our faith is not our faith. The object of our faith is Jesus. And this meal keeps feeding faith, which is why we share it each Sunday. We want to persevere, and this Table gives us, again and again, the one to believe in: his body and blood given for us.