John Bunyan and the Grace of Fearing God

Joel R. Beeke, Paul M. Smalley

• Publisher: P Publishing
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781629952055
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies

What brings out the best in believers? John Bunyan's life was changed when he abandoned doubt and despair, embracing the necessity and transforming power of the fear of the Lord.

1

John Bunyan’s Pilgrimage to Peace

John Bunyan (1628–1688) lived in fearful times.¹ Over the course of his six decades spanning the middle of the seventeenth century, England was visited by deadly plagues and torn apart by civil wars. The land seethed with social unrest; some even tried to bring in the kingdom of God by fomenting an uprising to overthrow the government. England’s Stuart kings often tried to rule without Parliament, and one of these kings perished at the hands of the state. A historian remarks that Bunyan saw “the most turbulent, seditious, and factious sixty years of recorded English history.”² Bunyan himself lost his first wife and spent more than twelve years in prison. His personal life was full of hardship, persecution, and suffering.

However, Bunyan was not a man who was shaken by current events or personal sorrows, but one who had learned “to live upon God that is invisible” (see Heb. 11:27).³ His endurance in faith and obedience to Jesus Christ prompted a recent biographer to give him the title of “Fearless Pilgrim.”⁴ Like Christian in his famous allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Bunyan persevered past all the spiritual lions and giants on his way to the Celestial City. Yet one writer has criticized Bunyan severely for his “fear-dominated theology.”⁵ Another writer wrote less critically, “If we single out the predominant tone of Bunyan’s sermons, we would have to give priority to fear.”⁶ Which was he: fearless or fear-dominated? In reality, Bunyan believed that Christian courage and fear were inseparable. In many ways, he was like his own fictional character Mr. Godly-fear, whom he described as “a man of courage, conduct, and valour.”⁷

Who was Bunyan? How could he be a man of such courage and yet of such great fear? To answer these questions, we must go back nearly four hundred years to a village in England.

The Beginnings of an Unlikely Pilgrim

John Bunyan was born in 1628 in the village of Elstow, near Bedford, to Thomas and Margaret (Bentley) Bunyan. John was baptized on November 30, 1628, in the local parish of the Church of England. It does not appear that his parents brought him up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, for as a youth he scarcely knew how to talk without using profanity.⁸

At the time, King Charles I ruled Britain (r. 1625–1649). William Laud had risen to be bishop of London (later to become archbishop of Canterbury), and those holding to Reformed doctrine and piety found themselves in ever-increasing disfavor in church and state as a result of the rise of Laud’s high-church Arminian party. In 1620, the Separatists of the “Pilgrim Fathers” had sailed for the New World, and in 1630, John Winthrop led the beginnings of a major Puritan exodus to New England.

Bunyan’s family, however, living in a village more than fifty miles north of London, may have felt removed from such political and ecclesiastical conflicts. Though their ancestors in the sixteenth century had been landowners in the manor of Elstow, declining fortunes had left them relatively poor. His father was a tinker—a brazier or tinsmith who repaired vessels made of soft metal, such as cooking pots and pans. Bunyan learned to read and write but otherwise was not well educated.

Bunyan soon displayed the evils of his sinful heart. He later wrote, “It was my delight to be taken captive by the devil at his will (2 Tim. 2:26), being filled with all unrighteousness . . . from a child that I had but few equals . . . both for cursing, swearing, lying, and blaspheming the holy name of God.”⁹ That is not to say that he had nothing to rebuke or restrain his run into ungodliness. Death was always near in the seventeenth century—in 1636, the plague visited England again, killing thirty thousand people or more. When he was nine or ten years old, nightmares and spasms of conscience frightened him and made him wish that there was no such thing as hell, but he quickly cast off these fleeting religious impressions. He became “the very ringleader of all the youth that kept me company in all manner of vice and ungodliness.”¹⁰

In 1642, the kingdom was plunged into turmoil when conflict between King Charles I and Parliament erupted into civil war. Tragedy also struck at Bunyan’s home. At age sixteen, he experienced “shock and misery,” for his mother and sister died a month apart.¹¹ His father quickly remarried. John joined the Parliamentary forces in 1644, later organized as the New Model Army under Oliver Cromwell. He served in the garrison at Newport Pagnell, a unit that was “chronically behind in its pay and poorly equipped.”¹²

On one occasion, God spared his life in a remarkable manner: “When I was a soldier, I, with others, were drawn out to go to such a place to besiege it; but when I was just ready to go, one of the company desired to go in my room; to which when I consented, he took my place; and coming to the siege, as he stood sentinel, he was shot into the head with a musket bullet, and died.”¹³

He may have heard the gospel preached by Puritans and the more radical sectarians among soldiers. It is also possible that Bunyan had been exposed to Baptist teachings as early as 1642, when Benjamin Coxe was preaching in Bedford. Coxe was later a signatory of the 1644 London Confession of Faith, an early Particular Baptist confession.¹⁴

Civil war would break out again in 1648, but, in 1647, Bunyan left the army and returned to the life of a tinker. His portable stake anvil was discovered in 1905 with his name and the year 1647 inscribed on it. Like the pilgrim of whom he wrote, he understood what it meant to carry a burden; the anvil weighs sixty pounds.

In January 1649, Charles I was put on trial, condemned, and executed as a traitor. England suspended its monarchy and became a commonwealth. That same year, Bunyan married; we do not know his bride’s name. Further trials arrived for the new family when their first child, Mary, baptized on July 20, 1650, was born blind.¹⁵ Three more children would follow.

Here, then, we have a young man in his early twenties with a history of irreverence and rebellion. He had suffered the death of mother and sister and had seen the horrors of war while yet a teenager. He was a man with little education who worked with his hands—a “mechanic,” in the language of his day. He might have lived and died in obscurity, with a dirty mouth and a dirty soul. For such a man to become a godly Christian pastor seems unlikely, and to become a premier Christian author seems almost impossible. There is a powerful lesson for us in the early life of Bunyan. The apostle Paul expresses it in 1 Corinthians 1:26–27: “Ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called: but God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise.” John Bunyan is a shining example of God’s sovereign freedom to choose whom He pleases. One of the first steps in the fear of the Lord is recognizing that God is God and that we are not.

The Lord delights to turn human expectations upside down. He does this for a noble purpose: “that no flesh should glory in his presence” (1 Cor. 1:29). Instead, Christ is everything to believers— “wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption: that, according as it is written, He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord” (vv. 30–31). If you have faith in Christ and love for His people, then give thanks to God (see Eph. 1:15–16). If you have gifts and abilities, do not boast in yourself, but boast in the Lord, for your talents are the gracious gifts of Christ (see Eph. 4:7). Furthermore, as we look at other people, let us judge no man according to the flesh (see 2 Cor. 5:16). God can take anyone, even the chief of sinners, and make that person into a useful servant of Jesus Christ. Yes, even if you have cursed God all your life and seen tragedy and violence, God can make something beautiful of your life through Jesus Christ. But it must begin in the heart, as it did with Bunyan.

The Work of God in the Heart

Bunyan’s godly wife came from a poor family, but she brought him a dowry of two books. One was The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven by Arthur Dent (1553–1607), a devotional classic that presents the gospel and Christian life through a conversation shared by four men. The other was The Practice of Piety by Lewis Bayly (c. 1575–1631), another classic describing God, heaven, hell, and the cultivation of piety as a way to prepare for Christ’s return. Bunyan and his wife sometimes read these books together, and she told him about the holy lifestyle of her father.

Bunyan responded to these Christian influences with an outward show of religion and superstitious regard for the priests and ceremonies of the Church of England. His pastor, Christopher Hall, preached a strong sermon against breaking the Sabbath, but Bunyan ignored it and played his usual games on the Lord’s Day. However, his conscience struck him, and he began to wonder if he was damned beyond all hope. This despair hardened him further, and he “went on to sin with great greediness of mind,” until a woman, herself with a very poor reputation, rebuked him for swearing and cursing so much that she feared he would corrupt all the youth of the town. This rebuke so shamed Bunyan that he broke off his habit of perpetual swearing. He also began to read his Bible and reform his morals with an outward keeping of God’s commandments, yet he remained ignorant of Jesus Christ and His saving work.¹⁶

This was a time of Puritan ascendancy in England. At the Battle of Worcester (Sept. 3, 1651), Oliver Cromwell led the New Model Army to defeat Royalist forces, causing Charles II, son of the executed monarch, to flee England for France. From 1653 to 1658, Cromwell ruled England as the lord protector. This decade was a period of multiplication of religious sects of many kinds. However, it was also a time when the Puritans, committed to Reformed evangelical truth and godliness, could gather in freedom and worship God according to their consciences. Bunyan would meet such people, and by their example and witness God changed his life.

One day, Bunyan’s work as a tinker took him to Bedford, and he came across “three or four poor women sitting at a door, in the sun, talking about the things of God.” Considering himself quite a religious man by now, he went to talk with them. However, what he heard shook him.

I heard, but I understood not; for they were far above, out of my reach: their talk was about a n...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Note on Abbreviations and Sources
• 1. John Bunyan's Pilgrimage to Peace
• 2. Preacher and Prisoner for Christ
• 3. The Dread and Terrible Majesty
• 4. Sinful and Preparatory Fears toward God
• 5. The Grace of Fear
• 6. Perfecting Holiness in the Fear of God
• 7. Trembling at the Word
• 8. Persevering by the Power of Godly Fear
• Summary and Conclusion
• Bibliography