Dr. Williamson walked every Saturday to Mankato to preach to four hundred Dakota men imprisoned by the government during a recent war. In February 1863, Williamson and Gideon Pond baptized three hundred of the prisoners that came to believe the gospel. Dr. Williamson presided at the organization of the first church in Minnesota, and when it came time to organize the Synod of Minnesota in 1858, he led the proceedings in St. Paul. His sermon was delivered from Deuteronomy 8:2, “And thou shalt remember all the ways which the Lord thy God led thee.” He remembered the many ways the Lord had blessed his ministry as he recounted the history of early missionary work among the Dakotas.

Thomas Smith was born March 1800 in Union District, South Carolina, to Rev. William and Mary (Smith) Williamson. His father was pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Fair Forest. In 1805, the family moved to Adams County, Ohio, where Thomas studied in local schools to prepare for further work at Jefferson College in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania. He began studying medicine in Cincinnati but transferred to Yale to complete the Doctor of Medicine graduating in 1824. Dr. Williamson returned to Ohio to intern with a local physician in West Union before moving to Ripley to set up his own practice. In 1827, he married Margaret Poage, the daughter of Col. James Poage. During the first six years of marriage the Williamsons had three children, but they died in their early years with two passing away within just a few months of each other. In the early 1830s cholera occurred several times in Ohio and young children were especially susceptible to the disease, so the Williamson children may have died of cholera. Thomas and Margaret were stunned by the three-fold tragedy. The deaths raised questions of their direction in life and what would God have them to do. Thomas had come to faith in Christ while in college and as he and Margaret discussed their options, they believed they would serve the Lord in missions to the American Indians.
In the spring of 1833 physician and ruling elder Williamson began the process for becoming a missionary. He was taken under care of the Presbytery of Chillicothe and spent a year at Lane Theological Seminary studying for the ministry. At a presbytery meeting held at Red Oak in 1834 he was examined for licensure with trials including reading an exegetical paper composed in Latin answering the question whether Christ’s death was vicarious; provided a written paper on Psalm 2:7-12; and then he delivered a sermon on Mark 16:16, “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.” Trials completed, he was licensed and then combined pulpit supply with scouting the region of what is currently Minnesota to determine the best place for missions to the Indians. Williamson determined the Dakota people provided the best opportunity. He reported to Chillicothe Presbytery his findings and on September 18, 1834 he was ordained an evangelist working with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM). Thomas, Margaret, and his wife’s sister, Mary Poage, joined Alexander G. Huggins, a school teacher, and his family for the journey. They departed Ripley April 1, 1835 and headed up the Mississippi on a steamboat arriving May 16 at Fort Snelling near Minneapolis.
During the weeks at Fort Snelling the Williamsons adjusted to frontier life and gathered goods to take with them to their place of ministry. In Fort Snelling June 11, 1835, Williamson organized the first Presbyterian congregation in the region that would become Minnesota with nineteen members and four ruling elders including U. S. Army Major G. A. Loomis. The church was named Presbyterian Church at St. Peters. Williamson later conducted the wedding ceremony for Loomis’s daughter, Eliza Edna, when she married Lt. Edward A. Ogden. It was the first marriage service by a clergyman in what would become Minnesota.
Read More
Related Posts:

God intends either discipline or testing by what is suffered, and both produce the good of improved sanctification.[29] We are not allowed to take “natural calamity” out of that package of necessary suffering for the believer. God in His providential care designs the calamity as a blessing in sometimes macabre dress. We are to “consider it all joy . . . when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance.”[30] Suffering is a foundational aspect of sanctification. 

We must acknowledge that the most troubling problem emerging from any large scale natural disaster is not that people die. That is a real human and emotional issue, but not the most significant one. Hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, fires, tornados or floods do not change the statistics on the number of the human race experiencing death by even one digit. A typhoon in Bangladesh swept away between 300,000 and 500,000 lives in 1970,[1] and the worldwide influenza pandemic of 1918 exterminated between 50,000,000 and 100,000,000,[2] but neither of these catastrophic events changes the grim prognosis that every member of the human race will die. We are dying at a hundred percent rate already.
It is also not the overarching dilemma that natural events destroy what we have made—our homes, buildings, roads, etc. No one should be surprised when a house or building is brought to nothing in a mudslide in view of the fact that God declares that decay will eventually destroy all things anyway.[3] We are promised the cataclysmic destruction of the entire earth as we know it in the future.[4] Some have lost these things earlier than they had hoped they would, but that they would be destroyed should never be in debate with evangelicals. So there is nothing new here either.
Furthermore, it should not be a conundrum to us that many people face an alteration of their existence due to catastrophe. A new order will come to everyone eventually; heaven and a new earth will be experienced by some[5], and hell for others. Death alters everything, as will Christ’s return.
We should also remember that there is no meaningful dissimilarity in the horribleness of death in a natural disaster as opposed to normal times. If it were possible to ask a man in the sanitary environment of a hospital what it is like to breathe his last breath when he is drowning in his own fluid, he would tell you it is every bit as horrific as being drowned in a flood. Because God mercifully allows the body to experience shock in times of fright, many will thankfully have some anesthesia when they die, whether natural or narcotic. But death is still a ravaging enemy wherever and however it is encountered. Some may linger in the hospital room for days before they die, while others under the rubble caused by an earthquake painfully expire from dehydration. A woman may die instantly when a hurricane pushes her house down, while her sister may end her two year struggle with an insidious malignancy with screams. Which is easier?
Everyone will die; everyone will lose whatever they have; everyone will face a completely altered existence; everyone will experience the horror of last moments on earth. We have already bought into all of these as theological verities. So what is so arrestingly unique about a natural disaster? Why do we become poetic and communicative about it? Why do we not hear news commentators saying, “Today an earthquake in India did the normal: It took a few thousand lives, destroyed property, took people to another existence and did it in the typically horrible way. The stock market was up today with heavy volume . . .”
We are alarmed because a natural disaster brings dramatic focus to these universal inevitabilities. It paints them in vivid color right before our faces so that we cannot escape them. We see how impotent we are. Our invincibility evaporates; our vulnerability parades in front of us and mocks us. We watch as people just like us, going about their business, lose everything and die in a moment. It grabs us precisely because it is us we are hearing about. Natural disaster is not about something new happening, or even about something unusual happening, but about something that has always happened and is inescapable for each of us—and more precisely, for me.
All death and destruction comes from the most cataclysmic event of history, the fall of man, and from the resulting just judgment of God.e[6] Our natural world groans under the resultant bondage.e[7] Believers, of all people, should learn to reconcile themselves to this fact. One pastor was reminded by God after the loss by flood of all his awards and letters from important people not to be concerned. Reportedly God said to him, “Don’t worry . . . I was going to burn them anyway.” Whether he heard these words directly or not, the sentiment was true.[8]
The certainty that death, decay, and destruction are going to happen anyway to all of us and to all of our things, however, does not eradicate the internal pain that believers may experience. Even Christ, who said, “Let not your heart be troubled,” was “distressed and troubled,” and “deeply grieved, to the point of death” by the weight of sin placed on Him. With perfect knowledge and absolute trust, He still worked out His peace with the cross on Gethsemane. Granted, His was an infinitely bigger burden than ours, but there is surely a lesson here.
Some of the greatest of saints have also been depressed about losses or disruptions (David, Elijah, Spurgeon, and Martin Lloyd Jones, etc.). Ongoing emotional troubles remind us that disaster of any sort is often an immense trial, spinning off secondary disasters, like hurricanes spin off tornadoes, even among believers. If this is so, we more-average saints must have much aid in understanding and coping with natural disaster when it affects us or those we love dearly. What can help?
When disaster occurs, the mental/emotional state of the believer is directly bound to his spiritual perception. Ultimately, and often immediately, believers can overcome a debilitating freefall into anxiety over what has transpired. It becomes the pastoral job to not only empathize, but to lead believers to have a biblical perspective about disaster and loss as soon as possible—preferably prior to the event occurring. It is concerning this perspective that I wish to direct our attention.
Nature Obeys God
The disciples said of Jesus, “. . . even the winds and the sea obey Him?”[9] This verse is often employed apologetically with skeptics for the purpose of proving that Jesus is actually God. The believing world has almost always asserted, in pacific times, that God controls nature. The farmer prays to God for rain for his dry fields, just as the Christian school teacher requests from God clear skies for the class picnic, because we assume that God has everything to do with it. But does this general, almost presupposed evangelical belief extend far enough when times are more difficult?
As an illustration of how God’s oversight of nature may be addressed, the Second London Baptist Confession clarifies the extent of God’s control in its first and second under “Divine Providence.” It is worth a careful reading:

God who, in infinite power and wisdom, has created all things, upholds, directs, controls and governs them, both animate and inanimate, great and small, by a providence supremely wise and holy, and in accordance with His infallible foreknowledge and the free and immutable decisions of His will. He fulfils the purposes for which He created them, so that His wisdom, power and justice, together with His infinite goodness and mercy, might be praised and glorified. (Job 38:11; Ps. 135:6; Isa. 46:10,11; Matt. 10:29-31; Eph. 1:11; Heb. 1:3)
Nothing happens by chance or outside the sphere of God’s providence. As God is the First Cause of all events, they happen immutably and infallibly according to His foreknowledge and decree, to which they stand related. Yet by His providence God so controls them, that second causes, operating either as fixed laws, or freely or in dependence upon other causes, play their part in bringing them about. (Gen. 8:22; Prov. 16:33; Acts 2:23)[10]

This historic confession has not overstated the biblical principle. The Psalmist speaks convincingly concerning the control of God over natural events:
Whatever the Lord pleases He does, in heaven and in earth, in the seas and in all deep places. He causes the vapors to ascend from the ends of the earth. He makes lightening for the rain; He brings the wind out of His treasuries.[11]
It was God who ordained each of the natural plagues on Egypt, for instance, including turning water to blood, filling the land with frogs, sending hail, and devastating locusts. Even Pharoah recognized this.[12]
Moses stretched out his staff toward the sky, and the Lord sent thunder and hail, and fire ran down to the earth. And the Lord rained hail on the land of Egypt.[13]
Read More

Related Posts:

.kb-row-layout-id223392_4ab238-bd > .kt-row-column-wrap{align-content:start;}:where(.kb-row-layout-id223392_4ab238-bd > .kt-row-column-wrap) > .wp-block-kadence-column{justify-content:start;}.kb-row-layout-id223392_4ab238-bd > .kt-row-column-wrap{column-gap:var(–global-kb-gap-md, 2rem);row-gap:var(–global-kb-gap-md, 2rem);padding-top:var(–global-kb-spacing-sm, 1.5rem);padding-bottom:var(–global-kb-spacing-sm, 1.5rem);grid-template-columns:minmax(0, 1fr);}.kb-row-layout-id223392_4ab238-bd{background-color:#dddddd;}.kb-row-layout-id223392_4ab238-bd > .kt-row-layout-overlay{opacity:0.30;}@media all and (max-width: 1024px){.kb-row-layout-id223392_4ab238-bd > .kt-row-column-wrap{grid-template-columns:minmax(0, 1fr);}}@media all and (max-width: 767px){.kb-row-layout-id223392_4ab238-bd > .kt-row-column-wrap{grid-template-columns:minmax(0, 1fr);}}
.kadence-column223392_96a96c-18 > .kt-inside-inner-col,.kadence-column223392_96a96c-18 > .kt-inside-inner-col:before{border-top-left-radius:0px;border-top-right-radius:0px;border-bottom-right-radius:0px;border-bottom-left-radius:0px;}.kadence-column223392_96a96c-18 > .kt-inside-inner-col{column-gap:var(–global-kb-gap-sm, 1rem);}.kadence-column223392_96a96c-18 > .kt-inside-inner-col{flex-direction:column;}.kadence-column223392_96a96c-18 > .kt-inside-inner-col > .aligncenter{width:100%;}.kadence-column223392_96a96c-18 > .kt-inside-inner-col:before{opacity:0.3;}.kadence-column223392_96a96c-18{position:relative;}@media all and (max-width: 1024px){.kadence-column223392_96a96c-18 > .kt-inside-inner-col{flex-direction:column;}}@media all and (max-width: 767px){.kadence-column223392_96a96c-18 > .kt-inside-inner-col{flex-direction:column;}}

Subscribe to Free “Top 10 Stories” Email
Get the top 10 stories from The Aquila Report in your inbox every Tuesday morning.

Promises and commands all have a context. Just as Jeremiah 29:11 was a promise with a context (not modern-day graduates, but ancient Israelites in exile), so also proverbs have a context, a specific situation at which they are aimed. And instead of seeing proverbs as “general” or “broad” statements, we need to see them for what they truly are: very specific and particular statements. They speak to the minute details of life, which is why they can even sound contradictory at times. 

Pick up a book with Bible-reading advice, and you’ll barely get your nose in before it gets mashed with the ubiquitous yet astonishingly forceful declaration: Proverbs aren’t promises! This piece of conventional wisdom is everywhere. Though it has roots in careful thinking about the genre of wisdom literature, this advice often goes too far and misses the point of the proverbs.
In almost every case, the counsel comes with strong emotion and a reference to Proverbs 22:6. Too many people have seen too many people bludgeon the hurting parents of wayward children through immature and thoughtless reference to this crucial verse about parenting. (“If you had trained your child right, he would not have walked away from the Lord.”) And the pastoral reflex is just right. This is not how to use Scripture.
Train me up. I promise I’ll be good.
But the conclusion—that proverbs are not promises—is not right. In this case, the cure is worse than the disease.
Deep Roots
Consider first, the many respectable authors and pastors who promote the conventional wisdom. They often offer sound counsel, and their sensitivity to abuse is spot on. But when discussing how to read wisdom literature, they move in synchrony:
“A common mistake in biblical interpretation and application is to give a proverbial saying the weight or force of a moral absolute.” (R.C. Sproul)
“The proverbs commend certain paths to family members because they reflect the ways God ordinarily distributes His blessings. But ordinarily does not mean necessarily…Proverbs are not promises.” (Richard Pratt)
“The particular blessings, rewards, and opportunities mentioned in Proverbs are likely to follow if one will choose the wise courses of action outlined in the poetic, figurative language of the book. But nowhere does Proverbs teach automatic success.” (Gordon Fee & Douglas Stuart)
“The proverbs are meant to be general principles.” (John Piper)
“The proverbs appear to represent likelihoods rather than absolutes with God’s personal guarantee attached.” (James Dobson)
In other words, all agree: Proverbs are general, but not universal, statements. Proverbs are usually, or ordinarily, true. They speak about what is likely, not about what is guaranteed. But proverbs certainly are not promises. They are not absolutes. We cannot bank on them completely.
Where the Roots Run Aground
But consider some amazing statements from the proverbs. And consider where we end up if we read them as probabilities instead of promises. The conventional wisdom feels right with a verse like Proverbs 22:6, but it doesn’t hold up with much of the rest of the book.
According to Lady Wisdom: “If you turn at my reproof, behold, I will pour out my spirit to you; I will make my words known to you” (Prov 1:23). According to the conventional approach, this means that only most people who turn at wisdom’s reproof will know her words. It cannot be absolutely certain that wisdom is available to those who turn to her. Some who turn will be disappointed when she rejects them anyway.
Or consider chapter 2: “My son, if you receive my words and treasure up my commandments with you, making your ear attentive to wisdom and inclining your heart to understanding…if you seek it like silver and search for it as for hidden treasures, then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God” (Prov 2:1-5). This can’t really mean what it says. What Solomon wants to communicate is that those who receive and treasure, pay attention and incline their hearts, seek wisdom like silver and search for it as for hidden treasure—such people might understand the fear of the Lord. Some—but not all—who seek the wisdom of God, and who seek it in the way God requires, will know God in the end. Hopefully you can be one of the lucky ones.
Read More
Related Posts: