I found that to embrace God’s greatness, to say “Thy will be done,” was painful at first and then, perhaps counterintuitively, profoundly liberating. 

I have spent a good part of my life talking with people about the role of faith in the face of imminent death. Since I became an ordained Presbyterian minister in 1975, I have sat at countless bedsides, and occasionally even watched someone take their final breath. I recently wrote a small book, On Death, relating a lot of what I say to people in such times. But when, a little more than a month after that book was published, I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, I was still caught unprepared.
On the way home from a conference of Asian Christians in Kuala Lumpur in February 2020, I developed an intestinal infection. A scan at the hospital showed what looked like enlarged lymph nodes in my abdomen: No cause for concern, but come back in three months just to check. My book was published. And then, while all of us in New York City were trying to protect ourselves from COVID-19, I learned that I already had an agent of death growing inside me.
I spent a few harrowing minutes looking online at the dire survival statistics for pancreatic cancer, and caught a glimpse of On Death on a table nearby. I didn’t dare open it to read what I’d written.
My wife, Kathy, and I spent much time in tears and disbelief. We were both turning 70, but felt strong, clear-minded, and capable of nearly all the things we have done for the past 50 years. “I thought we’d feel a lot older when we got to this age,” Kathy said. We had plenty of plans and lots of comforts, especially our children and grandchildren. We expected some illness to come and take us when we felt really old. But not now, not yet. This couldn’t be; what was God doing to us? The Bible, and especially the Psalms, gave voice to our feelings: “Why, O Lord, do you stand far off?” “Wake up, O Lord. Why are you sleeping?” “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?”
A significant number of believers in God find their faith shaken or destroyed when they learn that they will die at a time and in a way that seems unfair to them. Before my diagnosis, I had seen this in people of many faiths. One woman with cancer told me years ago, “I’m not a believer anymore—that doesn’t work for me. I can’t believe in a personal God who would do something like this to me.” Cancer killed her God.
What would happen to me? I felt like a surgeon who was suddenly on the operating table. Would I be able to take my own advice?
One of the first things I learned was that religious faith does not automatically provide solace in times of crisis. A belief in God and an afterlife does not become spontaneously comforting and existentially strengthening. Despite my rational, conscious acknowledgment that I would die someday, the shattering reality of a fatal diagnosis provoked a remarkably strong psychological denial of mortality. Instead of acting on Dylan Thomas’s advice to “rage, rage against the dying of the light,” I found myself thinking, What? No! I can’t die. That happens to others, but not to me. When I said these outrageous words out loud, I realized that this delusion had been the actual operating principle of my heart.
The cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker argued that the denial of death dominates our culture, but even if he was right that modern life has heightened this denial, it has always been with us. As the 16th-century Protestant theologian John Calvin wrote, “We undertake all things as if we were establishing immortality for ourselves on earth. If we see a dead body, we may philosophize briefly about the fleeting nature of life, but the moment we turn away from the sight the thought of our own perpetuity remains fixed in our minds.” Death is an abstraction to us, something technically true but unimaginable as a personal reality.
For the same reason, our beliefs about God and an afterlife, if we have them, are often abstractions as well. If we don’t accept the reality of death, we don’t need these beliefs to be anything other than mental assents. A feigned battle in a play or a movie requires only stage props. But as death, the last enemy, became real to my heart, I realized that my beliefs would have to become just as real to my heart, or I wouldn’t be able to get through the day. Theoretical ideas about God’s love and the future resurrection had to become life-gripping truths, or be discarded as useless.
I’ve watched many others partake of this denial of death and then struggle when their convictions evaporate, and not just among the religious. I spent time as a pastor with sick and dying people whose religious faith was nominal or nonexistent. Many had a set of beliefs about the universe, even if they went largely unacknowledged—that the material world came into being on its own and that there is no supernatural world we go to after death. Death, in this view, is simply nonexistence, and therefore, as the writer Julian Barnes has argued, nothing to be frightened of. These ideas are items of faith that can’t be proved, and people use them as Barnes does, to stave off fear of death. But I’ve found that nonreligious people who think such secular beliefs will be comforting often find that they crumple when confronted by the real thing.
So when the certainty of your mortality and death finally breaks through, is there a way to face it without debilitating fear? Is there a way to spend the time you have left growing into greater grace, love, and wisdom? I believe there is, but it requires both intellectual and emotional engagement: head work and heart work.
I use the terms head and heart to mean reasoning and feeling, adapting to the modern view that these two things are independent faculties. The Hebrew scriptures, however, see the heart as the seat of the mind, will, and emotions. Proverbs says, “As he thinketh in his heart, so is he.” In other words, rational conviction and experience might change my mind, but the shift would not be complete until it took root in my heart. And so I set out to reexamine my convictions and to strengthen my faith, so that it might prove more than a match for death.
Paul brand, an orthopedic surgeon, spent the first part of his medical career in India and the last part of his career in the U.S. “In the United States … I encountered a society that seeks to avoid pain at all costs,” he wrote in his recent memoir. “Patients lived at a greater comfort level than any I had previously treated, but they seemed far less equipped to handle suffering and far more traumatized by it.”
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None of this is to defend the cruelties associated with slavery. It is simply to say that Brown’s response was the wrong one, and that we should neither approve it nor celebrate him. Brown was celebrated for his militancy, and he seems to have regarded such militancy as the proper fruit of the Christian faith.

In 1860 a newspaper called The Christian Watchman and Reflector published a series of letters from Charles Spurgeon, in one of which he denied rumors that the American publishers of his works excised material that might be offensive to slaveholders. Highly perturbed at the suggestion, Spurgeon said, amongst other things, that “any slaveholder who should show himself in our neighborhood would get a mark which he would carry to his grave, if it did not carry him there.” He finished the letter in view by saying that “John Brown is immortal in the memories of the good in England, and in my heart he lives.” Here we have a minister of the gospel with a high reputation and wide influence expressing his opinion with such fervor as to descend into talk of his neighbors possibly murdering foreign citizens and praising an insurrectionist.
This is of interest because the statement in view is cited as proof that many evangelicals condemned slavery at the same time that many southern Protestants were defending it. It is certainly proof of that sober truth, though there are plenty of other sources that make the same point that lack the regrettable character of Mr. Spurgeon’s statement here. To be sure, he did not say that he would approve such lawless violence, much less that he would participate; and it is conceivable that Victorian era Englishmen were not quite as prone to waylaying foreigners as Mr. Spurgeon suggests. It could be that he was so caught up in a fit of high dudgeon that he wrote more boldly than was warranted, and that the talk of lawless violence was idle banter.
Whatever the case, it was not in accord with the duty of his office to speak in such a manner, and it is a point of curiosity that contemporary critics of 1800s southern evangelical attitudes about slavery so readily latch upon examples such as this. Such critics are quick to point at the perceived hypocrisy of claiming Christ while at the same time defending a civil institution that oppressed its participants and was often attended by great physical cruelty. And so in finding grounds to condemn the violence and hypocrisy of slaveholding they . . . . latch upon examples of evangelicals mentioning violence approvingly.
This is a strange method, surely, and it goes far to undermine the critics’ own moral authority. Why, pray tell, do we consider slavery wrong? Is it not because it does violence to the dignity of its unwilling participants, holding them in bondage and subjecting them, in many cases, to harsh punishments for flight or disobedience? Is it not because of the chain and the lash, the separation of families and the prohibition of literacy, and because of all the other things that denied equal protection and rights under the law and reduced slaves to being a permanent under caste? Is it not because the whole institution denied them their rights as human beings whose nature is no different from that of people of other classes and ethnicities? Why then would it be any less evil to do similar things to other people, including slaveholders or people who are citizens or public officials of places where slavery was legal? Mistreatment is wrong regardless of who does it or why, and our Lord forbids vengeance (Lev. 19:18; Deut. 32:35; Rom. 12:19; Heb. 10:30) and prohibits former victims of oppression oppressing others in turn (Ex. 22:21; comp. Deut. 23:7).
It is here that John Brown enters the question. Many people in his day regarded him as a hero with few equals, and after his death he was hailed as a martyr and prophet, Henry David Thoreau saying that he had become “an angel of light” and a popular camp tune saying that he was “John the Baptist of the Christ we are to see.” That enthusiasm has not dimmed, it seems, for Christianity Today has published an article urging the glad acceptance of Brown as an evangelical hero.
John Brown was hanged for treason and murder for leading the seizure of the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia) as part of a scheme to forcibly abolish slavery in the southern states. Brown’s plan was to use his action to incite slaves in the surrounding areas to flee their masters and join his forces, after which they would march southward, collecting men and materiel as they went. Ostensibly his forces would fight only in self-defense if accosted.
That last bit makes for a large claim to swallow when we remember that Brown had already attained national notoriety for organizing private militants in the Bleeding Kansas crisis earlier in the 1850s. Brown had presided over the Pottawatomie Massacre, in which five men had been hacked to death in what can only be considered cold-blooded murder. The other facts are also against interpreting his plan and actions as a scheme of fomenting an armed-but-purely-defensive insurrection, such as that two of the five men his band killed at Harpers Ferry were unarmed. One was the mayor, the other a free black man who was the first victim and who was shot in the back. If these killings were against Brown’s intentions, as has been suggested, they nonetheless suggest that he had poor control over his force that he had trained for his occupation of the arsenal; and it is hard to imagine that he would have had any better control over the multitudes of strangers whom he expected to rally to his standard.
It is likely that arming large numbers of escaped slaves, whatever Brown’s ostensible intention, would have led to aggression and even the wanton taking of vengeance on their part. Virginia’s earlier slave revolt 28 years before (Nat Turner’s) had been attended by the killing of civilians, including women and children. It is simply not human nature for spontaneous mobs to act only in self-defense and to eschew all criminal and vengeful tendencies. And notwithstanding that Brown attempted to give legitimacy to his efforts by establishing a ‘provisional government’ replete with offices and constitution, what Brown actually attempted, whether he realized it or not, was to foment an enormous mob, probably the largest in the history of the country. Had he succeeded he would have been culpable for any excesses that such a mob committed, but as it was he gained very little support.
There is another fault with such an argument, which is that it is generally a principle of law that one cannot provoke resistance by threats or assault and then use force to repel the violence that ensues: the initial provocation makes one the aggressor, so that every subsequent action is a furtherance of the aggression and cannot be justified as defensive. Brown was the aggressor in the Harpers Ferry affair, for he started it by seizing the arsenal, and then continued it by taking hostages and preventing the lawful authorities from repossessing it or rescuing them. When it was then claimed that his subsequent fighting with state and federal forces was in self-defense (as his defense attempted at his trial), the claim is null – and more than a little brazen and absurd.
One cannot break into someone’s house and take him captive, and then say that he acted in self-defense by firing at the police when they surrounded the house. All notion of self-defense goes out the window when one first commences his criminal venture. And yet that is essentially what Brown did, except that he acted not merely against a single private individual and domicile, but against an entire commonwealth and its populace.
I have no desire to impugn the faith or integrity of those who have lionized Brown through the decades. Indeed, anyone who would allow that Spurgeon remark above to dissuade him from reading Spurgeon appreciatively would be doing himself an enormous disservice, for flights of indignation notwithstanding, Spurgeon was greatly used by God and is well worth reading. Remarks like that above are drowned out by the enormous quantities of edifying material he produced: it is as a flake of chaff in an ocean of grace.
But I do think that such people, be they past or present, are sorely mistaken on this point. There is nothing in the New Testament that justifies fomenting armed rebellion. Romans 13 says, “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities” and “whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.” Granting the institution of southern slavery was evil, it does not follow that it should have been countered by violent force. “Repay no one evil for evil, but give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all” (Rom. 12:17). Evil must be opposed righteously; and fomenting rebellion that was likely to lead to widespread bloodshed cannot be deemed righteous. It is in direct contradiction of the commands to “live peaceably with all” and “overcome evil with good” (12:18, 21).
And in the outcome of Brown’s misadventure at Harpers Ferry we see the wisdom of our Lord’s instructions on this point. Brown’s insurrection failed utterly. He gained only a handful of supporters among the local slave population; succeeded in getting himself, many of his men, and several citizens killed; and further aggravated the already tense relations between North and South, ultimately playing an important role in provoking secession and the subsequent war that killed more than 620,000 men.
Over against all this we must remember that Christ’s kingdom is not of this world, and that he did not come to establish it by means of force (Jn. 18:36). When someone mentioned an example of Pilate’s cruelty toward the Jews (including sacrilegious murder), Christ declined to cry aloud for temporal justice and instead urged his hearers to take heed for their souls and repent while they had time (Lk. 13:1-3). His way is not the way of social revolution, but of patient long-suffering (Matt. 5:39) and of repaying evil with good (Lk. 6:28; Rom. 12:14, 20; 1 Pet. 3:9). Those who, like Brown, attempt to find in Christ’s message a justification for armed revolution contradict the essence of that message, and many of its particulars (2 Tim. 2:24; Tit. 3:1-2; Heb. 12:14; Jas. 3:17).
None of this is to defend the cruelties associated with slavery. It is simply to say that Brown’s response was the wrong one, and that we should neither approve it nor celebrate him. Brown was celebrated for his militancy, and he seems to have regarded such militancy as the proper fruit of the Christian faith. In his speech at his conviction he appealed to Scripture as justifying his actions:
Court acknowledges, too, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed, which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament, which teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me further to remember them that are in bonds as bound with them. I endeavored to act up to that instruction.
When someone celebrates Brown he is therefore celebrating a man who contradicted the teaching of Scripture under the guise of fulfilling it. Against this, consider these words and ponder whether John Brown’s behavior accords with them: “Whoever says he abides in him [Christ] ought to walk in the same way in which he walked” (1 Jn. 2:6). Christ walked in the way of works of mercy and witness, and his death redeemed the souls of many. Brown walked in the way of the sword and came to the end which Christ predicted of those who do so (Matt. 26:52), and his death brought not peace but division and strife and a war that consumed multitudes. It is no part of our faith to honor such a man, and the scriptural data abundantly point the other way.
Tom Hervey is a member of Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church, Five Forks (Simpsonville), SC. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not of necessity reflect those of his church or its leadership or other members. He welcomes comments at the email address provided with his name. He is also author of Reflections on the Word: Essays in Protestant Scriptural Contemplation. 
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The oil signifies the regenerative work of the Spirit that makes the dead sinner to live, that saves this poor man and brings him to embrace Jesus Christ through faith, as He is freely offered to us in the gospel. We can go as far as to say this oil is the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ that always abides with His people. Some may prefer to limit the oil to representing the saving faith in the wise virgin and I don’t see the two views as significantly different. The oil is a comparison, a picture, of all these great spiritual truths. Those with saving faith are also born again. 

They that were foolish took their lamps, and took no oil with them: but the wise took oil in their vessels with their lamps.
Matthew 25:3-4
One of the great joys in studying the Scripture is to find an element of a particular text that seems initially obscure and mysterious but when the balance of the Scripture is searched the mysterious becomes known all for the glory of God and increase of our faith. One such example is the oil of this parable. The foolish virgins had lamps but no oil while the wise took oil in their lamps. What should we make of this oil?
When we have a question about a portion of Scripture, we should always ask ourselves: where else does God speak of these things in His Word? Does God speak about lamps and oil anywhere else in Scripture? We find He makes explicit reference to a lamp and oil in His instructions to Moses concerning the tabernacle. And thou shalt command the children of Israel, that they bring thee pure oil olive beaten for the light, to cause the lamp to burn always (Exodus 27:20). The tabernacle in the Old Testament had a lamp that was never allowed go out. It demonstrated God’s presence, the Light of the world, was always with them. Keeping the lamp filled with oil was an essential job in the tabernacle. A young man named Samuel was given the task in service to the Lord – to keep the lamp filled with oil that it might not go out (I Samuel 3:3).
A lamp without oil is like a car without gasoline. It may look nice on the outside but it cannot do what it is made for. All the virgins had lamps but not all the virgins had oil for their lamps. The oil reminds us of the lamps. The lamps remind us that they need oil in order to shine. Last time we considered the meaning of the lamps and said they represented the confession of Christ by our mouths. Those in the Kingdom of Heaven all confess with their mouths that Jesus Christ is Lord. One cannot be in the Kingdom of Heaven without such a confession. Confession is essential to entrance into the Kingdom. But we see in this parable what is true throughout Scripture – confession with the mouth alone does not mean a person is a Christian. Christianity goes beyond this – A Christian is one who confesses with their mouth that which they believe in their heart.
Remember that tremendous text from Romans we considered last time when we saw the requirement for the Christian to do two things: 1) confess with the mouth and 2) believe in the heart.
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