Is the God you think of day to day much happier than you? Do you think the Father bright and abundant or rather frownful and displeased? Does he enjoy his Life? Or is he just a tad bored, waiting for you to cheer him up a bit? What is your God like? We smile less than we might, because we feel little warmth from the smiling God.

We have heard the good news of the holy God, the just God, the three-in-one God, the mighty and compassionate, the faithful and all-wise, the loving and prayer-hearing and covenant-keeping God — but what of the happy God, the blessed God? If we look forward to “enjoying him forever,” do we not first need to be convinced that he is enjoyable? And can a King who stifles song or laughter really satisfy our souls (though he be otherwise strong and wise and good)? Do we color the God of Beauty grey, imagining him who makes the seraph burn and the bird warble to be the Sovereign Eeyore in these Hundred Acre Woods?

Gospel of God’s Happiness

Again, the inescapably personal question: Is your God happy? Is he deeply pleased, eternally bright, the waterfall cascading the edges and satisfying your adopted soul, if born again you be? Can you join to sing,

Joyful, joyful, we adore Thee,God of glory, Lord of love;Hearts unfold like flowers before Thee,Opening to the sun above.

I want my heart to unfold more sweetly, more fully. So, let’s gaze up at the brilliance of the divine happiness together. As with the apostle John, if everything were to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books (John 21:25). Most must be omitted, but even as a little honey can brighten the eyes, a few glimpses of his happiness can freshen our joy in him.

His Pleasure Precedes Us

Mercifully, the Arkenstone jewel of God’s happiness is not the creature — his perfect, holy, complete joy precedes us. God’s happiness is infinite and eternal and untainted precisely because it is independent — he draws from wells we knew not of, that which always was and always will be.

Survey the pantheon of gods, and here alone we find the only Being that can satisfy the soul forever. A fulsome ocean surges within himself — Father, Son, and Holy Ghost — waters of bliss that he invites the redeemed to swim within. God has never been needy or lonely or bored. The salvation of man is a subplot, a minor theme, within an eternal drama of Trinitarian love. Baffling man-centric theologies, John Piper writes,

Within the triune Godhead (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), God has been uppermost in his own affections for all eternity. This belongs to his very nature, for he has begotten and loved the Son from all eternity. Therefore, God has been supremely and eternally happy in the fellowship of the Trinity. (Collected Works, vol. 2, 48–49)

Here we find our glad tidings: His happiness does not depend upon us — thus he can satisfy us. None can pickpocket his pleasure. Not Satan, not the world, not our sin. “It should delight us beyond all expression,” writes Henry Scougal, “to consider that the one who is beloved in our own souls is infinitely happy in himself and that all his enemies cannot shake or unsettle him from his throne” (Life of God in the Soul of Man, 83). The triune God’s delight cannot sag or wobble; his cheerful crown cannot topple from his brow. He does not sink into despair.

Gladness Who Creates

If eternity were an apartment, God did not need a pet to keep him company. The triune God needed nothing upon which to dote or depend. His golden existence never borrows from other suns.

Yet we read, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1) — why? If he is so happy and blessed, why create anything at all? Because God delights to share his fullness, his happiness, his life, his love, his glory — not to complete that fullness, but to extend it to others.

“There is an expansive quality to his joy,” writes Piper. “It wants to share itself. The impulse to create the world was not from weakness, as though God were lacking in some perfection that creation could supply.” To quote Jonathan Edwards, “It is no argument of the emptiness or deficiency of a fountain, that it is inclined to overflow.” Again, Piper writes, “All his works are simply the spillover of his infinite exuberance for his own excellence” (Works, 49).

In the beginning, then, God created the heavens and the earth freely, bountifully, happily. He looked down as an artist painting — stars, fish, mountains, man — “Oh, that is good!” He creates and admires and gives and fills and blesses from a full cupboard.

Delight Comes for Us

The God who didn’t need you to be happy, the heaven within himself that needed not angels or humans, sacrificed to include us in that happiness. He came for us.

The God who did not need us chose us — and at total cost to himself. The blessedness of God increases the gospel’s voltage. If God had thrown all into the lake of fire, downed Adam and Eve in a flood, and moved on, God would have lost nothing. But the great I Am — rising from his own good pleasure as Giver, for his own great name of Love, growing from the everlasting heart of a Father — authored a story, perilous and splendid, full of darkness and light, to communicate himself more fully, and exalt his Son, and so fill our cup to overflowing.

“God’s happiness does not depend upon us — thus he can satisfy us.”

Ours is not just the gospel of God, but “the gospel of the glory of the blessed God” (1 Timothy 1:11). Rightly do angels longingly gaze after it. When time ripened, the eternal Son came. Begrudgingly? Reluctantly? Indifferently? “In him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross” (Colossians 1:19–20).

Glimpses of eternal rays pierce through at Jesus’s baptism and transfiguration. The Father’s supreme delight shone down upon his Son: “Behold, my servant whom I have chosen, my beloved with whom my soul is well pleased” (Matthew 12:18; 3:17; 17:5). “Father,” Jesus prayed on the eve of his death, “I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world” (John 17:24).

The Son’s whole drama — sung to us as good news — plays out in a theater of eternal love: The Father to the Son, the Son to the Father, and the Spirit lifting the elect to dwell in those clouds.

Happiness Brings Us Home

The God who does not need us to be happy himself promises to make his people happy forever. At the end of our weak service, the Master says, “Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master” (Matthew 25:23). Enter into the paradise of triune bliss, the Promised Land of milk and mirth, of honey and happiness.

Does your God invite you into his own joy? I find the unfaithful servant of the story instructive. The Master gave him one talent, and he went and buried it. Why did he bury it away?

Master, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you scattered no seed, so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here, you have what is yours. (Matthew 25:24–25)

He did not know the Master who invites into his own joy. The Master who smiles and says, “Well done.” He harbored hard thoughts, buried his talents under hard ground, and received a hard wage: “You wicked and slothful servant! . . . Take the talent from him and give it to him who has the ten talents. . . . And cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matthew 25:26, 28, 30).

How vital it is to know God’s heart. How many talents hide beneath mounds of dirt in our backyards? Do you believe you serve a hard and extorting God? Believer, come to the open window and gaze through Jesus’s words: “Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom” (Luke 12:32). Stir at your God’s vow: “I will rejoice in doing them good, and I will plant them in this land in faithfulness, with all my heart and all my soul” (Jeremiah 32:41). Quiet under his singing:

The Lord your God is in your midst,     a mighty one who will save;he will rejoice over you with gladness;     he will quiet you by his love;he will exult over you with loud singing. (Zephaniah 3:17)

Orthodox of Heart

Brother or sister in Jesus, the God you serve from day to day, is he happy? Not just holy, powerful, righteous, or wise, but happy? Not flustered, standoffish, or unimpressed, but happy?

“Is it not a pity,” asks Richard Baxter, “that our hearts are not as orthodox as our heads?” Yes, it is a pity. Oh, how our hearts would burst. How fiercely his happiness would arm us against worldliness. How carelessly we would laugh off lesser pleasures of lust and pride. How we would dare to take greater risks with our talents, empowering evangelism and world missions.

When we see the heights and depths of God’s happiness, how can commands such as “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice” seem unreasonable (Philippians 4:4)? How can we resist the psalmist’s summon, “Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth! Serve the Lord with gladness! Come into his presence with singing!” (Psalm 100:1–2)? How can we not endure unwanted trials knowing that we shall soon be before our Lord in whose “presence there is fullness of joy” and at whose “right hand [there] are pleasures forevermore” (Psalm 16:11)?

A few more days, a few more sorrows, a few more disappointments, and then . . .

Audio Transcript

Boredom and purpose are the two themes we’re talking about this week. They’re related. Last time, on Monday, we looked at God’s purpose in our boredom — basically, that God plans for human beings to be frustrated by their experience in this world until they realize that they were made for God. It’s a really helpful reminder.

And today we continue talking about purpose as we seek to find and follow God’s will for our lives. We’re on the topic because tomorrow, in the Navigator’s Bible Reading Plan that we’re reading together, we launch into Philippians and study one of the key, essential texts for learning to discern God’s will. I’m talking about Philippians 1:9–10. Read those verses especially carefully, because in them we learn that following God’s will requires that we “approve what is excellent.” In other words, we taste test our way to discerning God’s will. He intends that we have a faculty, a palate, for tasting what is true and what is pleasing.

The question today is from a podcast listener named Tenielle. She asks about another text, but Philippians 1:9–10 is going to factor in here. Here’s the question: “Pastor John, Romans 12:2 says, ‘Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.’ Pastor John, what does Paul mean when he says ‘by testing’?”

That is a really, really good question. I love it because it means she is really paying attention. She is looking at the book, and she cares about the words, and I love people who care about the words of Scripture. And she is obviously reading from the English Standard Version, I think, because that phrase is translated in different ways. Let me just give it again: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God.”

Spiritual Litmus Test

“By testing.” Now, that phrase — “by testing you may discern” — is the translation of one Greek word, dokimazō. The standard lexical definition goes like this: “to make a critical examination of something to determine genuineness, such as metals by fire.” And interestingly, it is used in 1 Corinthians 3:13, where it says, “Fire will test [and that is the word, dokimazō] what sort of work each one has done.” So, our works at the last day are going to be tested by fire.

The idea is that the genuineness of something — in this case, the will of God in Romans 12:2 — is found out by an appropriate test. For metals, it is often fire. For genuine ripeness in fruit, it would be like tasting. And for genuine health in a horse, you might look at his teeth. And here, interestingly, powerfully, in Romans 12:2, the thing to be recognized is the will of God — namely, “what is good and acceptable and perfect.” And the question is, So, what is the test? Do you look at the teeth of the will of God? Or do you put your tongue on the behavior you are testing? Do you put some match to it? What is the test? And Paul answers, “The renewal of your mind is the test. By the renewal of your mind, you will be able to discern by testing what is the will of God.”

Here is the picture I have in my mind: my renewed mind — renewed by the word of God, renewed by the Spirit of God, renewed by soaking in the revealed nature of God in Scripture — is litmus paper that turns green when the good and acceptable and perfect will touches it. Green: go for that. And it turns red when it considers some act that is not the will of God. It is not good. It is not acceptable. It is not perfect.

So, my mind is being shaped by God into the kind of mind that, when it contemplates a behavior or an attitude or a word, there is something that reflexively says no or yes to it, because of the way our mind has been formed.

Approve What Is Excellent

Here is a great example that shows you how the mind is being renewed for this very purpose. It is Philippians 1:9–10, where Paul is praying that this would happen. He prays like this: “It is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, so that you may approve [now, there is the word] what is excellent.”

“The renewed mind has the spiritual taste so that when something is seen to be of God, it tastes good to us.”

So, he is saying that what happens to your love is that love gets more knowledge in Scripture, and love gets more insight in Scripture, and love gets more of everything it needs to be the kind of litmus paper it needs to be, so that when you are out there in the world, and you are navigating at work every day, and you don’t have your little lists in your pocket to say, “Oh, where is a list I can consult?” — well, you can’t consult a list for every decision you have to make. I would say 90 percent of the decisions we make through the day don’t have a list that applies to them.

You have got to make judgment calls over and over again as to what is good, what is acceptable, what is perfect. And that is why our minds are being renewed day by day.

Delightful Taste

Let me say one more thing that I think is crucial here. The translation “discern by testing” might give the impression that all that is implied is, well, you test, you discern, and you know that is the will of God. You don’t like it, but you do it anyway.

That is not what is going on. The word dokimazō doesn’t just mean to prove and discern. It means to prove, and then when something is found to be genuine — approve of it. We know that because in Romans 1:28, it says the sinners did not approve to have God in their knowledge. And that is the word, dokimazō. They didn’t want it. They didn’t love it.

And so, the renewed mind is the mind that not only has the mental or intellectual or knowledge or insight capacities to discern something that is good and acceptable and perfect, but it also has the spiritual taste so that when something is seen to be of God, it tastes good to us. We delight in it. We approve of it.

Justice shall be done to the memory of my Hamilton.

According to her daughter, this was the compounding yearning of Eliza Hamilton in the fifty years she survived her husband, after his tragic, and dishonorable, death in an “affair of honor.” In the summer of 1804, he took a duel with Aaron Burr Jr., the sitting Vice President and grandson of Jonathan Edwards. Alexander Hamilton, citing Christian conviction, “threw away his shot” by not firing at his opponent. Burr, however, took aim and struck his political rival. Hamilton died 31 hours later on July 12, 1804.

Not only had the controversial circumstances of his death tarnished her Hamilton’s reputation, but so too had an another “affair” made public in 1797. And after Hamilton’s death in 1804, rivals John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both lived another 22 years to strengthen their own founding legacies, and bury Hamilton’s.

Justice Done to Hamilton?

Remarkably, Ron Chernow’s 800-page biography in 2004 — some 150 years after Eliza’s death in 1854 — began the work of doing justice to Hamilton’s memory in the twenty-first century. More than a decade later, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical, inspired by the biography, and with Chernow as historical consultant, sent Hamilton skyrocketing back into broader American awareness — just in time to save his face on the ten-dollar bill.

Of Christian interest, Hamilton appeared to have experienced a remarkable conversion, under Reformed teaching, as a teen when the Great Awakening came to his native West Indies in the early 1770s. Presbyterian minister Hugh Knox, who had studied at the College of New Jersey (where Edwards had been president briefly in 1758) mentored the 17-year-old Hamilton. When a hurricane passed through the Caribbean in August of 1772, Hamilton wrote markedly Christian reflections on the event. Knox read them and, impressed with the teen’s ability, guided them to press in the local paper. Enough readers took notice of the words from “a Youth of this Island” that it became an occasion for Knox to raise money to send Hamilton to New Jersey to study.

Journey into a Far Country

Hamilton soon left the West Indies, never to return, and arrived in New Jersey as the revolutionary spirit was fomenting. With his unusually able brain and pen, he was swept up into the Revolution and found himself at the heart of American politics from 1775–1800, perhaps surpassed only by George Washington in that quarter century. His Christian interests, however, seemed to cool 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 1789–1795. Alongside James Madison, Hamilton proved 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), Hamilton far surpassed Madison, and the other leading founders, in economics.

Yet in his late forties, before dying in the infamous duel at age 49, Hamilton experienced a succession of great humblings, which appear to have prompted him, doubtless with the encouragement of his enduringly faithful evangelical wife, to blow again on the embers of the Christianity of his youth. Chernow, for one, recognizes that Hamilton’s late-life preoccupation “with spiritual matters . . . eliminates all doubt about the sincerity of his late-flowering religious interests” (707).

As the United States celebrates 246 years of independence, and Americans newly remember the ten-dollar founding father, what might Christians learn from the rise and fall, and redemption, of the “wandering and reticent” Alexander Hamilton?

Hamilton’s Tragic Success

Politically speaking, we could identify many important insights from a recovery of Hamilton’s legacy, but far more important, as Christians, whether American or not, is learning from his spiritual journey into the far country. And these are not the kind of lessons we might glean even from a man who professed, say, deism or atheism throughout his life. Rather, Hamilton, by all accounts, evidenced a vibrant Christian faith in his teens and gave clear affirmations of faith in Christ on his deathbed. However, sadly, he was a prodigal of sorts — captured by politics and establishing himself in the world — for much of his twenties and thirties. His meteoric rise to political power appears to have eclipsed the fires of his fledgling teenage faith. Yet he did, it seems, come to himself, once humbled, and eventually return home seeking the arms of a Father.

His Early Faith

His 1772 published letter that proved to be his way out of the West Indies “viewed the hurricane as a divine rebuke to human vanity and pomposity” (Chernow, 37). The storm thundered, according to the 17-year-old Hamilton, “Despise thyself and adore thy God.” Yet Hamilton, in his faith, found safety.

See thy wretched helpless state, and learn to know thyself. Learn to know thy best support. Despise thyself, and adore thy God. . . . [W]hat 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.

That same year, he wrote a Christian hymn, one that Eliza would come to prize and cling to during the half century she outlived him. There he confessed, “O Lamb of God! thrice gracious Lord / Now, now I feel how true thy word.”

His Meteoric Rise — and Fall

However, his way with words was soon put to other purposes. Once in America, his wordsmithing would propel him into revolutionary leadership, then to Washington’s side, and eventually to the most powerful seat in the first executive administration from 1789 until 1795.

Hamilton’s long-standing relationship with Washington proved to be a stabilizing force. In hindsight, his most productive (and least self-destructive) work came when he was most proximate to Washington, leading to the first of four lessons.

1. The right relationships can provide wonderfully fruitful restraints.

Chernow observes, “After Alexander Hamilton left the Treasury Department [in 1795], he lost the strong, restraining hand of George Washington and the invaluable sense of tact and proportion that went with it.” Washington was magnanimous. Few were willing to stomach such personal offenses as he endured without retaliating. The fatherless and insecure Hamilton badly needed this stabilizing presence. “Hamilton had been forced, as Washington’s representative, to take on some of his decorum. Now that he was no longer subordinate to Washington, Hamilton was even quicker to perceive threats, issue challenges, and take a high-handed tone in controversies. Some vital layer of inhibition disappeared” (Chernow, 488).

But it was not only Washington, whose guidance was political, but also Eliza, whose influence was gently but relentlessly spiritual. “As a woman of deep spirituality, Eliza believed firmly in [Christian] instruction for her children,” and it would prove to have effects on her husband as they raised them together, and particularly as his great humblings came in late 1799, throughout 1800, and into 1801. She endured his wandering and, in the end, it appears, won him with her life and conduct (1 Peter 3:1).

2. Ambition to make one’s way in the world can cool the fires of young faith.

In the Parable of the Sower, Jesus tells about seed sown among thorns: “They are those who hear the word, but the cares of the world and the deceitfulness of riches and the desires for other things enter in and choke the word, and it proves unfruitful” (Mark 4:18–19).

“Ambition to make one’s way in the world can cool the fires of young faith.”

Hamilton, admirably, was not undone by the deceitfulness of riches — his financial integrity was sterling — but “the cares of the world” and “desires for other things” haunted his extended season of spiritual reticence (from his seeming indifference to Christianity from 1777 to 1792, to his opportunist use of it for party purposes until 1801). Fatherless since age 10, and orphaned at 14, Hamilton seemed bent on proving himself in his new country. The flame and striking warmth of his teenage faith cooled as “cares of this world” began to energize him — first the Revolution, then becoming a respected New York lawyer, then rescuing the fledgling nation from its inadequate Articles of Confederation, and finally trying to preserve his power once Washington left office.

Such a story is not his alone. Countless Christian youths, flames burning bright, have found themselves crashing on the hard rocks, and hard knocks, of adult life. How might it have been different? That leads to a third lesson.

3. Faith does not thrive (and may not survive) apart from the church.

Chernow notes that “Hamilton had been devout when younger, but he seemed more skeptical about organized religion during the Revolution” (132). Perhaps circumstances from his childhood, and particularly his mother’s death, “help to explain a mystifying ambivalence that Hamilton always felt about regular church attendance, despite a pronounced religious bent” (25). Recently, historian and pastor Obbie Tyler Todd has written that Hamilton, from his arrival in America, was a man torn between two denominations (Presbyterian and Episcopal) “while finding no real home in the communion of believers.”

In Hamilton’s case, the ominous absence of the church may be the clearest warning sign we can point to. At 17, Hamilton seemed to thrive under Hugh Knox’s pastoral influence. But without the strengthening and constraining influence of a local church, a faithful evangelical wife was not enough to keep him from wandering, even if she would be vital to his late-life renewal.

4. We can be most vulnerable when we feel strongest.

Hamilton’s 1791 adulterous affair with Maria Reynolds showed how far he had wandered — and reminds us of the delusion of power and success. 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 the 36-year-old Hamilton, at the height of his power — and with so much work to do — stayed in New York 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, written to vindicate his financial reputation, he would write that he came to her door with monetary assistance and, “Some conversation ensued from which it was quickly apparent that other than pecuniary consolation would be acceptable.” This is the first of several 1790s instances about which Chernow, even as the cool-headed biographer, 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. (362)

For Christians, the stakes are far greater than political reputation. Hamilton knew better — not only as a man and stateman, but as one who had professed faith in Christ. Perhaps he thought, for six years, that he had gotten away with it (politically speaking), with only the checks it took to pay off her husband’s blackmail. But the whispers were proclaimed from rooftops in 1797 and threatened not only to undo his future prospects, but also his past work.

Quiet Uptown: His Redemption

The late Adams administration held one humbling after another. Adams broke from his cabinet (and Hamilton) and sought peace with France in October of 1799. Two months later, Washington died suddenly. By February 1810, it became clear the Federalist party was turning from Hamilton to Adams. Then, by the end of April, 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 Douglass Adair and Marvin Harvey wrote in 1955, “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” (“Was Alexander Hamilton a Christian Statesman?” 322). Devasted, he began to consider again the God of his youth. Then it was in late November 1801 that he endured his greatest trial, when his 19-year-old son, Philip, was shot in a duel and died 14 hours later. Later he wrote to a friend that Philip’s death was “beyond comparison the most afflicting of my life.”

Yet by late 1801, as part of “his late-flowering religious interests,” Hamilton was taking 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.”

“Hamilton’s spiritual renewal is too pronounced to ignore, whether in a biography or on Broadway.”

“Hamilton’s spiritual renewal” is too pronounced to ignore, whether in a biography or on Broadway. His re-awakening appears to have preceded (and prepared him for) Philip’s death, even if Miranda captures it in the aftermath of his loss, in the culminating song “Quiet Uptown”:

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 know as powerful, and we 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.

Tender Reliance on Christ

Todd’s recent work focuses on those final 31 hours after the duel, and Hamilton’s clear affirmations of (what Chernow calls) “his late-flowering religious interests.” Not only did Hamilton there confirm, in general, “I am a sinner: I look to his mercy,” but more specifically, “I have a tender reliance on the mercy of the Almighty, through the merits of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

His end-of-life confessions were as clear as his teenage faith was warm. But for those of us who grieve his long, tragic journey into the far country of seeming political success and pride, we redouble our resolve to live now for what matters eternally, and welcome God’s humbling hand if we realize ourselves to have cooled and wandered.

Puritan Roots and Prayers

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, among others, is Hamilton’s longtime friend and collaborator, and first Supreme Court Chief Justice, John Jay.) And this is not to make much of Hamilton’s reticent and late-flowering faith, but to own how unevangelical was the nation’s founding.

On July 4, we remember a nation founded far more in step with the life Hamilton lived in his twenties and thirties, than his teenage profession and late-life renewal. However, from its dawning, the nation has not been able to shake its Puritan roots that grew up together with its deep Enlightenment influences. We do celebrate a nation that, however secular its founding, provided the soil in which the Second Great Awakening could grow and flourish in the first half of the nineteenth century and change the landscape, a nation still enduring under the world’s oldest active codified constitution, a nation we pray will again see future awakenings, even as it still today, with every new dawn, provides space for countless personal conversions to the true God, in Jesus Christ.