The Puritan Hope

Iain Murray

On this point Spurgeon spoke with certainty throughout his thirty-eight years’ ministry in London. Yet on some of the cardinal points which have usually divided interpreters of prophecy, Spurgeon was far from clear, and cannot be said to have followed any previous school of thought consistently. On the crucial issue as to how the Jews would be converted and the gospel triumph, whether by Christ’s personal advent or by the outpouring of the Spirit, Spurgeon from the outset of his ministry in London appears to have held unequivocally that it would be by Christ’s personal appearing, that is, he taught
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a pre-millennial advent: ‘He who understands the prophets, believes not in the immediate conversion of the world, nor in universal peace; he believes in “Jesus only”; he expects that Jesus will first come; and to him, the great hope of the future is the coming of the Son of Man’ (‘Jesus Only’, a Sermon preached in 1857, Vol. 45, 374). Two years later in a sermon ‘A Vision of the Latter-Day Glories’, he says, ‘When Christ shall come he will make short work of that which is so long a labour to his church. His appearance will immediately convert the Jews’ (Vol. 5, 198). This pre-millennial belief remained with Spurgeon throughout his ministry, it is expressed in some of the closing sermons of his life, and in a brief confessional statement drawn up in 1891, he subscribed to the tenet, ‘Our hope is the Personal Pre-millennial Return of the Lord Jesus in glory’ (The Sword_and Trowel, 1891, 446). In a sermon on Timothy 3.5 preached in 1889, he says: ‘Apart from the second Advent of our Lord, the world is more likely to sink in to pandemonium than to rise into a millennium. A divine interposition seems to me the hope set before using Scripture, and, indeed, to be the only hope adequate to the occasion’ (Vol. 35, 301).

There is, however, another strand running through his sermons — what may be called the main strand of Puritan prophetic thought — and this cannot be harmonized with the statements just quoted. In two sermons on the calling of the Jews, and in so far as we are aware they contain his fullest treatment of the subject, one preached in 1864 and the other in 1877, there is no reference whatever to their conversion being through the sight of Christ’s person; on the contrary, their salvation is spoken of as the work of the Spirit producing faith. It is ‘the unseen but omnipotent Jehovah’ who ‘is to be worshipped in spirit and in truth by his ancient people’ and the means used by the Spirit for their ingathering are preaching and praying:
‘Preaching is the blast of the ram’s horn ordained to level Jericho, and the sound of the silver trumpet appointed to usher in the jubilee. . . . 0 for greater faith, to believe that nations may be born in a day, that multitudes may be turned unto God (257)

at once, and we shall yet see it — see what our fathers never saw’ (‘Mourning for Christ’, vol. 23, and ‘The Restoration and Conversion of the Jews’, vol. 10, the quotation being from the latter sermon, pp. 429, 434 and 436).
The theme of the universal spread of the gospel through preaching which will be in demonstration of the Spirit and with power is by no means infrequent, and on some occasions, as for example in a sermon on Psalm 22.27 entitled ‘The Triumph of Christianity’, it receives extensive exposition. In this sermon Spurgeon attacks the idea that we are not to hope for a glorious future on earth brought about by the preaching of the gospel and opposes those who ‘foretell that we are nearing the period of decay, when something better will suplant The heads of this sermon are: ‘i. The Conversion of the Nations to God May be Expected. 2. The Conversion of the Nations will Occur in the Usual Manner of Other Conversions. 3. The Means to Accomplish this Result Are to be Found At Calvary.’ To the same purpose, he spoke as follows at a Missionary Meeting in May, 1867 while dealing with the need for more missionaries: ‘It would be easy to show that at our present rate of progress the kingdoms of this world never could become the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ. Indeed, many in the Church are giving up the idea of it except on the occasion of the advent of Christ, which, as it chimes in with our own idleness, is likely to be a popular doctrine. I myself believe that King Jesus will reign, and the idols be utterly abolished; but I expect the same power which turned the world upside down once will still continue to do it. The Holy Ghost would never suffer the imputation to rest upon His holy name that He was not able to convert the world’ (quoted by G. H. Pike, Life and Work of Charles Haddon Spurgeon, vol. 4, 210).

prophecy to the New Testament Church, the emphasis on terrestial Jerusalem as the centre of future hope, the idea of two future Comings of Christ — one to establish his kingdom upon earth and another to conclude it at the day of judgment —on all these Spurgeon is, as far as the present writer is aware, entirely silent. On one occasion he does speak of two future resurrections separated by an interval of time, the duration of which he does not determine (Vol. 7, 346), but this is far from common in his Sermons, where his general practice is to treat Christ’s Return and the Day of Judgment as one event. In an article, ‘Jerusalem which is above’, he makes a pungent attack on the general prophetic outlook of the Brethren though professing, in a sentence, his own attachment to the pre-millennial school of interpretation. Belief in ‘two advents of Christ, one before and the other after the Millennium’, he characterizes as one of ‘the strange vagaries of seducers’ (The Sword and Trowel, August 1866). One is not surprised, therefore, to find Spurgeon representing the coming of Christ as the means whereby believers will enter upon perfect blessedness and eternal blessedness, ‘They can say good—bye to sin, and good—bye to sorrow; they can say to all discouragements, to all bafflings, to all defeats, “Farewell”’(Vol. 45, 597).
Of the alleged difference between ‘the Church’ and God’s people in other ‘dispensations’, maintained by J. N. Darby, Spurgeon declared: ‘We have even heard it asserted that those who lived before the coming of Christ do not belong to the church of God! We never know what we shall hear next, and perhaps it is a mercy that these absurdities are revealed one at a time, in order that we may be able to endure their stupidity without dying of amazement (Vol. 15. 8). Little did he think that within twenty years of his death a dispensationalist,
A. C. Dixon, would succeed to his pulpit at the Metropolitan Tabernacle!
While there is much longing for the day of Christ observable in Spurgeon — perhaps particularly so as he grew as a saint and his life approached its end — he never accepted the most common feature of nineteenth-century pre-millennialism, namely, (259)

that in point of time the Advent and millennium were at hand. ‘You want the millennium to come tomorrow, do you?’ he said on one occasion. ‘May you get it, but I think it is probable you will not. I do not know how history appears to you who profess to understand it, but it does not read to me like a thing which is going to end yet’ (Vol. II, 273). In accordance with this Spurgeon often spoke and thought of the continuing work of the Church after his death and urged upon believers the duty of so living that posterity would be blessed.
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We know of no ready solution to the apparently contradictory features in Spurgeon’s thought on prophecy. His biographer, G. H. Pike, has suggested that he moved from one position to another and believes he sees a difference between the thought in Spurgeons first book, piiblished in1857, and the outlook of his later days: The Saint and his Saviour reveals ‘what Spurgeon was in those sanguine days of his early prime when the wide world stretched before him as a domain to be won by the Church for her Lord. When he had received a few scars in the conflict, and had sobered down somewhat, he looked more to the Second Coming of Christ to bring about the final conquest which was so ardently desired (The Life and Work of C. H. Spurgeon, vol.5.96).

visit to Ireland in January, 1860, he told his congregation at the Exeter Hall: ‘It has been my lot these last six years to preach to crowded congregations, and to see many, many souls brought to Christ; but this week I have seen what mine eyes have never before beheld, used as I am to extraordinary things.

the veriest drivel to be muttering about an Armageddon at Sebastopol, or Sadowa or Sedan, and peeping between the folded leaves of destiny to discover the fate of Germany. Blessed are they who read and hear the words of the prophecy of the Revelation, but the like blessing has evidently not fallen on those who pretend to expound it, for generation after generation of them have been proved to be in error by the mere lapse of time, and the present race will follow to the same inglorious sepulchre’ (Lectures to my Students, First Series, 1887, 83).
In the same volume he tells his students that, ‘A prophetical preacher enlarged so much upon “the little horn” of Daniel, that one Sabbath morning he had but seven hearers remaining’ (p.100). There is much more in Spurgeon in the same vein; he ridiculed the novelties of interpretation which were being hawked about as new insights into Scripture and did not underestimate the spiritual evil which was resulting from the disproportionate attention which a number were giving to prophecy. This, in part, explains why in the long course of his ministry he preached very few sermons indeed in which unfulfilled prophecy receives any major treatment.

point of view. We cannot agree with Mr. Young, neither can we refute him the perusal of this work might be very useful to those dogmatical prophets who think that they are masters of the whole matter, when in fact there are great mysteries surrounding it on every hand. Only fools and madmen are positive in their interpretations of the Apocalypse’ (The Sword and Trowel, 1867, p. 470).
G. H. Pike says, ‘Much interest was felt in Mr. Spurgeon’ s views on prophecy, and perhaps this interest was the more keen on account of his not preaching so often on prophetical themes as some of his brethren in the ministry.’ Pike goes on to give this quotation from a letter from Spurgeon to the editor of Messiah’s Herald, written in 1874:

All this means that there are excellent statements in Spurgeon of varied viewpoints and I have made use in this book of some of these which follow in the Puritan tradition. But as Spurgeon would himself have been the first to say, no one should go to him to clarify their thinking on unfulfilled prophecy. He was a preacher like Knox and Whitefield,.moulded by God to make history rather than to interpret its future course.
That the pre-millennial hope came more to the fore in. Spurgeon’s closing years is not surprising. For it was then that he fought the cruel battle of the Down-Grade, when disbelief in any personal advent of Christ began to be heard in the Church and when the idea of ‘progress’ became a hallmark of liberalism. Even so, despite ill-health and the prevalent and. growing unbelief in the churches, he still looked to the Holy’ Spirit to turn the tide once more:

em dreamers droned out their wretched philosophies. All was decorous and dead; but God would not have it so. On a sudden, a voice was heard from Oxford, where the Wesleys and their compeers had found a living Saviour, and were bound to tell of his love. From an inn in Gloucester there came a youth, who began to preach the everlasting gospel with trumpet tongue. A new era dawned. Two schools of Methodists with fiery energy proclaimed the living word. All England was aroused. A new springtide arrived: the time of the singing of birds had come; life rejoiced where once death withered all things. It will be so again. The Lord liveth, and the gospel liveth too’ (‘Confidence and Concern’, a sermon preached in August, 1886, vol. 32’ 429—31).

Note: All the quotations from Spurgeon’s sermons given above are from the sixty-three volume series The New Park Street Pulpit and The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, a number of which are currently being reprinted by the Banner of Truth Trust.