Part 6

The jeweled hands of despotic tyrants were still clinging to the thrones of power as the 17th century dawned. But the people of Europe now had a new Light, the perfect Light of the Book, and it was shining into the darkest alleys of the most corrupt cities. The Light was exploding from pulpits in Geneva, Edinburgh, and England and it called an allegiance unto death to the King of Kings. The price for faithfulness was high. Bodies were burned and tortured, thousands exiled and whole towns annihilated by those trying to extinguish the Light.

But against all odds, the most persecuted of the Truth seekers made their way to a New World and lit a torch of liberty that would liberate hundreds of nations. These were the true liberators.

This is a continuing saga of the terrors and triumphs that have faced off in Western civilization. We’re going to talk about the unleashing of the Kingdom of God to the entire world. If we understand what took place in the beginning of the 17thcentury in England, we can see the foundation for everything that we have enjoyed in America over the last 300 years.

It wasn’t a party that you wanted to attend, unless you were willing to pay the price. The Divine Right Kings were still on the rampage throughout Europe trying to destroy this Reformation. In fact, most were still under their sway and the influence of their anti-biblical, paganistic worldview still dominated in most of Europe. Even London -that had seen some beginnings of Reformation -by 1590, was more like modern Las Vegas or downtown New York.

Imagine, if you will, walking with me through London in 1590. I will take you on a little tour. We would be walking through very narrow streets, with four or five story houses and raw excrement raining down upon us, should we be there early in the morning, gathering into the hole in the middle of the street. It was a decrepit Middle Ages town, filled with rats and disease. It was, however, the largest city in the world. Brothels and beer houses would be open all night long. One historian said that there were more brothels and beer houses in England than there were churches. This kind of immorality was everywhere.

Seeing these, I would realize this is not where I wanted you to be, so I would draw your attention to the great Cathedral of Saint Paul. We note that there is a lottery being sold inside, and there are parties going on. One of the leaders of the church is selling, at a high interest rate, opportunities to participate in these lotteries. Deciding that this wasn’t the spiritual haven we were looking for, we head to a better part of town, where people are gathering for their lunch –hardtack and wine –one of the people notloved by the king or bishop is being drawn and quartered that day. So, for a “luncheon treat,” the man has his arms and feet tied to two different horses, which are then spurred on. He is rent asunder and his innards are spread throughout the street. This activity has drawn an audience who has brought their lunch and come specifically to watch.

Feeling a little discouraged by our tour thus far, we cross the bridge and there in the Queen’s residence we find one of the hearts of the problem –hypocrisyand hatred for God. The Lord Chief Justice, Popham, is literally a highwayman who lets people off for a little bit of money, but the Christian martyrs and those being tortured are the ones paying the price.

As we look around, I imagine if we were there we would think the Rapture must be coming. I know I could potentially be saying, “The Lord must be coming, let’s get out of here, there is no hope!” What would you do if the man who was giving you the tour was named William Brewster? William Brewster happened to be a leader in the Queen’s court, but he had been defrocked, because his cousin had been accused of cutting the head off the cousin of the Queen, which wasn’t good, despite the Queen setting him up to do that. So, now, William Davidson is in the Tower of London and Brewster is running for his life.
After our tour with him, he invites us up to his little place in Scrooby, where he is the assistant postmaster. “There,” he says, “we are starting a new Reformation. We’re studying the Word of God and we’re going to believe God for a thorough Reformation and an exciting new world.” Would you have been ready to go to that Bible Study? Against the king’s orders? Against all the people around you? Would you have been willing to take that kind of stance? Or would you have gone the way of many who said, “Well, times are bad and there is just nothing that we can do”?

That’s what our time together is about. It’s at that very moment, when England was at its worst, that something took place. Through a period and a series of divine providential events and individuals, God brought together a Reformation that would change the world. Let’s just talk about a few of the individuals, as we are leading up to this Reformation.

Let’s begin with a bodyguard who, in 1546, finds himself losing the guy he is guarding: George Wishart, who was the great preacher of Scotland, who brought the message of the Reformation from Martin Luther back and preached the Gospel in the streets of St Andrews. He found himself again on the street, overlooking the Bishop’s castle –overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. As he was facing the castle, they had built a little stadium around him, so that the Bishop himself could experience and watch Wishart’s flesh burning. From two stories up, he could watch the flames as they began to burn this martyr of the faith. As Wishart looked up, he said, “Ah, Bishop, as you see me today, so will you be in a few weeks.”

That would be a prophecy you’d want to listen to! Anyone that is in the flames that is telling me that, I’d think maybe he was telling me the truth. Sure enough, a few weeks later, the Bishop was attacked by 70 men, who came in and stabbed him through, so he went to meet his just reward.

This beginning of a revolution in Scotland ledto the imprisonment of many people, including Wishart’s bodyguard. His name was John Knox. He ended up not only being imprisoned, but captured by a French galley, where they put him for life, to die there. He was chained to an oar on a French battleship. As he was leaving Edinburgh, probably for the last time in his life, he looked out the porthole and as legend tells us, he said, “God, give me Scotland or I die!” Do you say, “God, give me America or I die!” every morning? Do you wake up with that kindof a vision? John Knox had that kind of vision and he was a galley slave.

Almost two years later, he was dying, and because he was no longer any good to the crew, they threw him off in the sand, rather than kill him. An English couple then nursed him back to health. He went on to become the mentor of the future King of England.

This young future King of England only lived to be sixteen –almost seventeen years old, but he was the son of King Henry VIII. This young man lived long enough to be mentored into the Reformed faith and bring in a Biblical worldview and a Biblical prayer book and a Biblical clergy, so that England would never again truly go back to the Roman Church. All that in just five years, this young man trained by John Knox.

At that moment, none other than Bloody Mary takes the throne -because her brother dies, she comes in. She is a devout Roman Catholic, but more than that she is tied to Philip of Spain, who we have already talked about. She, with his power, and her hatred for the Reformed faith, goes about burning over 300 Reformers at the stake and sends the rest of them running for their lives.

Archbishop Cranmer finds himself at the stake after first denying the Reformation and then repenting of that. He said, “I must stand for the Truth.” When he was dying in the flames, because he had been back and forth and denied his faith once, he put his hand that had signed this recantation that he had made into the flames first and burned it, saying, “It is my hand, my hand, that has offended.”

Reformers like Ridley, Archbishop Cranmer and others, made this statement as they burned in Oxford, “We shall light a candle in England which will never be extinguished.” So they did. The English people were getting more fed up with their queen who was doing this to their leaders. In the meantime, the leaders of the Reformation fled for their lives. They ended up in a place called Geneva.

We mentioned in our last time together that there was a Frenchman who was converted to the faith when he was in his 20’s. By the time he was 28 years old, he had written the book that became the best selling book in Europe and perhaps one of the most important books written in the history of mankind. That book was called, “Institutes of the ChristianReligion.” His name was John Calvin.

Calvin literally changed the world from being a pastor in a place called Geneva, Switzerland, where he had a school of discipleship. Many would come and listen to him teach seven and eight times a week, at his church there. He trained and discipled them. He wrote letters to hundreds of pastors who were predominantly in France, and led to a conversion of one-third of that nation over the period of the next thirty years.

He was there, then, when this bloody pogrom took place in England. In the 1550’s he was overseeing this group: Whittingham, who was a Bible translator, tied together with Myles Coverdale who we spoke of before, who brought the William Tyndale Bible with him.

Along with him came a group of thinkers, Reformers and pastors as well as John Knox. During a four year period they were able to produce the first great English Bible that would come from a Reformational perspective.

The Geneva Bible was the first study Bible in the history of mankind, wherethe Bible had 300,000 words in terms of study notes after the Scriptures, so that the people could study this book in their home and understand what they were learning. It was the first time that the Bible had been in a modern typeface, so that the common man could understand the writing. It was the first time it was in the English language, a modern English language. It was the first time that a book was in a small quarto edition that could be put together and given into the hands of the people for less than an entire lifetime’s wages. It was the first Bible not chained to the pulpit so that people could now own one of their own.

Now we have the revolution, not in the hearts of a few Reformers, but going house to house to house throughout all of England and the entire English-speaking world. A revolution was truly taking place.

John Knox took that Bible and in 1558 came back to Scotland and sure enough, he did preach from the cathedral of St Giles in Edinburgh. He preached the Gospel of Christ and within a decade had converted and seen the conversion of much of Scotland to the Reformed faith, to the Scriptures and to the Lord Jesus Christ.

The result was that that Geneva Bible that he brought back with him became the Bible of Scotland and everyone who owned a piece of land or had over $500 was told by law to have a Geneva Bible and read it. Everybody took the Scriptures seriously. Scotland was so reformed that they kicked the Queen out and began the process of cultural as well as civil reformation and the beginning of limited civil government. Much of what we have in terms of liberty in America today, comes from the bravery of those Scots that stood for the truth against the tyranny of even the English kings.

That Scottish revolution went on, all the way into the 16th, 17th, and even the 18thcentury. It would rise and fall, rise and fall but still the Scottish Covenanters following in the footsteps of John Knox, went on to give their lives in the following century as King Charles, another divine right king, comes back into Scotland and starts persecuting them to the point that they actually take 4000 heavy horse to kill all the ministers of Scotland.

I was just there a few weeks ago, and in the Greyfriars Churchyard. In the graveyard there is a monument to the 18,000 ministers and their wives that were killed during the killing times.

The Covenanters. These were men and women who would not compromise their faith, but stood for the national covenant of Scotland to raise their children to the glory of God. Imagine if we had 18,000 ministers killed, drawn, quartered, stabbed, run through and shot, and wives who were put into the ocean, so that the tide comes in to kill them, while their daughters are at a higher level as they’re being called back to the Mother Church or die by the higher tide. They choose to die for their faith. Can you imagine that happening in the typical church today? That’s what happened in Scotland, because the Word of God was more powerful in their hearts than the tyranny of the king.

This transformed the world to such an extent that in the next century, even when there was another persecution by English kings, the Scots immigrated to a place called North and South Carolina. They came to the Americas. In fact, one of them became the president of what we call today Princeton University, the College of New Jersey. He was a direct descendant of John Knox. His name was John Witherspoon.

Witherspoon went on to train the Founding Fathers of America. At least twelve of themthat signed the Declaration of Independence along with 22 senators and 54 congressmen. He went on to train the Founding Fathers in the Biblical principles of Self-and Civil-government, that he learned from the Word of God, that he got learning from experience fighting tyranny in Scotland.

Oh, do we have a heritage! A heritage that comes out of this Reformation, of men and women who believed that God’s Word was more powerful than all the money, power and influence of all the kings of Europe.

The influence of the Geneva Bible came back into England. At the time that Queen Elizabeth comes to the throne, she allows the Geneva Bible back in. Of course this was the beginning, even though she was not thoroughly Reformed, she allowed the Word of God to be read. This was the beginning of a change in the English-speaking world.

You recall how bad things were in London, at the beginning of our section? At that same time, there was a reformation that was sweeping abroad, of a better note. In fact, historians say that the people of England, by the time of the Great Armada, had already begun to be a people of The Book. By the time you reach the 1590’s and now 1600, within a decade or two, a transformation was taking place.

These Puritans, as they were called, were not just, “I don’t want to drink, smoke or chew” kind of folks. They had lots of children, they would drink a little ale –that wasn’t their issue. Their issue was the Word of God. Their preachers, to this day, are considered some of the finest, if not the finest, preachers of the Word of God that the world has ever known.

This came to America, so that even the Virginia Anglicans were Puritan in their thinking. Sydney Ahlstrom the historian said that Anglicanism in America was actually a Puritanism of England, because it came over with the same Word, for the same reasons. J.D. Dow, historian, said that the Puritans wanted the fullness of life that made David dance before the Ark. They wanted a full life. They took this Cultural Mandate seriously. They believed that Christianity could restore and rebuild and give a greater and more blessed England.

William Tyndale, the early Puritan martyr -really, the progenitor of this entire movement, and who gave us the Geneva Bible in its basic format, in terms of its translation, a lot of it was done by him, before his death -he declared, “For the Puritan, the Gospel is good, merry, glad and joyful tidings that make a man’s heart glad and maketh him sing and dance and leap for joy!” That’s the kind of life I want. That’s the kind of life the Puritans believed could happen in their own country, and they believed that they could spread it throughout the whole world. It is the power of God giving blessing and happiness. Remember what we said from the very beginning? If we will walk according to that first commandment there shall be blessing.

Scripture is very clear, in Deuteronomy 7:9, If you walk with Me, I will bless you to a thousand generations. If you don’t, there will be a curse of iniquity to the third and fourth generations. That is exactly what we see happening here. People who believed the Word of God, acted upon the Word of God and the result was the greatest evangelistic movement that the world has ever known, the greatest explosion of missions that the world has ever known and the greatest explosion of private property and free enterprise.

Have you ever heard of the Puritan Work Ethic? Where did that come from? It came from men and women who were studying the Word of God and applying the principles of the Puritan Work Ethic of tithing and associating with Christians and living a covenantal lifestyle and being inventive and creative under God. Doing all that God had called them to do and investing in the future. The result is thatthey became the entrepreneurs.

When the kings of England made the mistake of kicking the Puritans out under James I and his son Charles, and Laud, the Archbishop of Canterbury, they made the mistake of kicking the Puritan leaders out. Despite them being about 4% of the population of England, they took one-fourth of the wealth of England with them. Not because they were rich and powerful by nature, or because they were royalty, but rather, because they had lived by God’s principles.

We see that application of the Word of God paid a tremendous dividend. When the Word of God was unleashed, England was transformed in a period about the length of one lifetime. Those of us that are alive today, could see, by the time we are gone, a Reformation that could sweep the media, sweep motion pictures, sweep every area of life and living for Jesus Christ and there could be a new world. It could explode right before our eyes and be filled with righteousness, holiness and joy.

So that once again we could have a world, as Benjamin Franklin noted during the Great Awakening, as he walked the streets of Philadelphia in the 1740’s, that there were songs and hymns and spiritual songs that were being sung on every street corner. Oh Lord, do it again. Why not again? If it could happen then, why not now? The foundations are being built. The foundations of over 1700 years now, have been growing and building the Kingdom of God.

It’s not getting worse, it’s getting better. It’s not getting more potentially impossible, it’s becoming more possible every day, exactly the opposite of what I hear from most of my historian friends and even my theologian buddies. They are so discouraged and depressed, that they think that every time they watch some television news program, they are seeing the fulfillment of prophecy. Rather than seeing the long term of what God’s Word says about His Kingdom, they are making their plans based upon temporal man and his feeble attempts to fight against the Kingdom of God.

As we’re closing, let me go back to England. I want to close with three stories that I think relate to a strategy. I want you to be thinking about the strategy that was used then –and there were different ones –and the strategy we can use now to bring a Reformation to our day. I’m thinking about three different events in three different nations that brought about three different results.

The question is, “How do you bring about a bloodless revolution?” All of us would like a revolution, not all of us would like to pick up a gun and begin to fight. If you have to, you have to, but is that really the way to do it? I believe that the greatest example of a bloodless revolution was proclaimed and begun on July 22, 1620, when the Pilgrims were gathered by their pastor in Delfthaven in Holland, where he preached his last sermon to them.

He said this, “Thus, this holy army of saints is martialed here on earth by these officers under the conduct of their glorious emperor, Christ. Thus it marches in its most heavenly order and gracious array against all enemies, both bodily and ghostly, peaceable in itself as Jerusalem, terrible to the enemy as an army with banners, triumphing over their tyranny with patience, their cruelty with meekness and over death itself with dying. Thus, through the blood of that spotless Lamb and the word of their testimony, they are more than conquerors bruising the head of the serpent, yea, through the power of His Word they have power to cast down strongholds and everything that exalteth itself against God. The gates of hell shall not prevail against His church!” ~ John Robinson

I don’t know about you, but I haven’t heard any local churches preaching like that. He was sending out the flower of his church. All of his elders –40 of them –while he stayed behind with 300 more. He told his people, knowing that they faced almost certain death, that as they went out, they were going out as more than conquerors, that they were a holy army that could not be defeated. He gave them their strategy, didn’t he? Their strategy was to go out and do what? Triumph over their tyranny with patience, their cruelty with meekness and over death itself by dying. Nothing could stop them. He understood that if they would walk with God, in the long run, they would win.

We’ll come back to that in a minute. But, let’s look at other revolutions that were begun by great Reformers. Revolutions that had good beginnings but didn’t end quite so well, in some ways. One would be the strategy of compromise. How about that strategy?If you’re going to have a revolution, there are different ways to do it, one way would be to simply compromise with your enemy so we can “go along to get along.” An example of this, at least to a certain extent is what happened in France, that has had repercussions up until our day.

In 1572, the great example of modern tolerance was tried. The French Huguenots had become so powerful because of their faith in Christ, that one-third of France was proclaiming faith in God through Christ. The result was that the French king and his evil mother gathered together with a plot. The plot of the evil mother was to have a wedding. Who doesn’t like a wedding? Let’s have a royal wedding. Let’s put together Henry of Navarre, who is a Protestant, as the future king of France and Mary Marguerite, her daughter.

This wedding is planned and it happens around Saint Bartholomew’s Day in August of 1572. Now, all of the French Huguenots had been fighting for over 15 years in battle after battle to keep from being killed. Because they were given assurances, they put down their weapons and they went to party in Paris for that entire month.

On August 24, of 1572, the king was given his orders by his mother, and early in the morning, they sent out ruffians, and then theentire mob attacked Admiral Coligny, who was the leader of the Huguenots. They cut his head off and sent it to the Pope and killed over 3000 Protestant leaders in Paris alone that night and tens of thousands more over the next several months. This was the result of a strategy of compromise.

What do we learn from a strategy like this? Well, if you have a humanistic enemy that hates you, you do not compromise principles. You do not try to develop a cohesion with those who are in hatred of the Gospel. That is what they tried to do and it did not work. Because they killed so many of the Huguenots and because they denied the faith, they went on to escape to America. I’m kind of thankful, in a way that they did that because my great-great-grandparents came to North Carolina and then they immigrated. Their names were the DeSpaignes, that was my mother’s name. She came and was a pastor’s daughter and she got pregnant from a Scottish G.I. In World War II and they dropped me off at a hospital in Santa Ana, California in 1945. But, my pastor grandfather had the foresight to write on the back of my birth certificate, “Raise my grandbaby Protestant Christian.”

I was adopted by Mormons four months later, from the hospital. They kept me in Mormonism until I was in 6thgrade. Then, my mother pulled out the birth certificate and read the back of it and said, “We’ve got to put him in the Protestant church.” They pulled me out of Mormonism and put me in the Protestant school, where I played “Spin the Bottle” until I found Young Life, until God got a hold of me in college. The rest is history.

The point is that God has a providential train of events and He is marching through history. As He is marching, yes, He can make good come out of bad.

The French not only compromised then, but they went on to deny even the Catholic faith in the French Revolution, where they cut the heads off of and drowned their own priests and defiled their own cathedrals, then turning and becoming the foundation of modern humanism. France has never truly recovered. This resulted in Napoleon killing tens of millions of people in his age. Even to this day, France is in chaos.

How about England? What was the strategy there? The strategy was two-fold. There were some that decided to stay there and fight the good fight of faith, so they did. It was a battle that was tough to win, because you had divine right kings on the throne, the Stewarts, and especially James I and his son. During that time what could one do but fight back? They had a problem, though. Many of the English were so tied to the concept of the divine right of kings, that they would not give it up and they were not true Believers.

They were trying to force a revolution –or at least they came to a place where they felt that they had to have one –because the king himself had become a tyrant. He had shut down Parliament, this is Charles I, and he began to kill ministers. Ministers like Reverend Bostwick in 1638 and at that point, the people were getting very angry and upset with him. He called the Parliament to raise some money and instead, they raised an army.

For the next five years, they fought a civil war against him. They captured the king and put him on trial and in 1649, they cut the head of the king of England off. Now, there’s one strategy, you just cut the head of the king off. You would think that would work. It did work for a little while, in fact, because they had a wonderful leader.

They had Oliver Cromwell, who was a devout Puritan, who tried to set up a Commonwealth and bring Parliament into the picture, but there was so much conflict and dissension, and no one wanting to take leadership, and they did not have a constitutional republic at that time. By the time you reach the end of the decade –about 1558 –Cromwell dies and his son can’t take over and they call for the king to come back. We end up with the son of that same king and the worst of all worlds happens for the next 30 years in England again.

The moral of this story is, be careful with revolution, because if you do not have the character of the people on your side, revolutions do not work and if they are not following what God wants, they are simply causing a revolution that will lead to more tyranny.

James Madison said, “To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty and happiness without virtue in the people is a chimerical idea. We do not depend upon the virtue of, or put confidence in, our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them.” The key to the Reformation in England was a long term reformation, wasn’t it? One of the hearts of the people. That had to come before you could overthrow the divine right of kings in a serious way.

The third revolution –one would be compromise, one would be confrontation, “Let’s take their head off” and the other one would be transformation. Remember, when we started this hour, I said, “Would you be willing to go to Scrooby? Let me ask you today, would you be willing to go to your Scrooby? To your house? To your town?To your village? To your city council? To your school board? Would you be willing to take up the cause of Christ for the transformation of your world where you live? That’s what the Pilgrims were deciding to do.

This story of the Pilgrims, who endedup coming to America, is the story of a group of individuals who would not compromise their faith, but found a place where they could express it, and they expressed it to their full measure, as best they could. In so doing, they brought with them Biblical principles of self-and civil government.

If you remember, in the last hour, we talked about the people of Leiden in 1574 as they stood against Philip of Spain. Sure enough it was the place where the Pilgrims went and spent eleven years in exile, after they were kicked out of England in 1608. There, under the teaching of John Robinson, the founding father of the Founding Fathers, the man who brought a Biblical worldview and theology of choosing your leaders and reflecting on a constitutional, Biblical form of government, living it out in your own life, being self-governing. This was all taught by this devout reformed pastor, who then trained this small congregation in Leiden that was still there, because the people had held out for the faith. Then, they were asked to come across the ocean where they settled in Plymouth, as we know. That is a revolution that changed the course of history.

That’s why I call it a bloodless revolution, because, if you read William Bradford’s journal, he was the governor of the Plymouth colony for thirty years, except for one year that he stepped down. He came over on the original Mayflower. As he neared the end of his life, he wrote in his journal, “From this one small candle, we shall light the entire nation. We have come here to propagate the Gospel of Christ to the remotest parts of the world. Yea, that we can be but stepping-stones for the promotion of so great a work.”

He had a vision that he could lay his life down and blow bubbles in the mud, but his children’s children would walk on his back and change the course of history and that the Gospel would be heard from this one little colony in the middle of nowhere, where half the people die the first winter that they are there. But they believed that they would carry on, if they would just live out their faith. If they would do what God had called them to do, then they could bring a better world. And the gates of hell would not prevail.

Let me ask you, what is your strategy today? Are you following your Lord to the victory that He has in front of us? A victory that is not just for ourselves and our own time, but for our children’s children to experience. Someday when we are in the great cloud of witnesses, our children will write of us that we were those who were faithful, who called the people of our time back to the victorious faith, the faith that is only found in Jesus Christ.