“Surely the Wrath of Man shall praise thee; the remainder of Wrath shalt thou restrain.” —Psalm 76:10

John Witherspoon Preaches on
‘The Dominion of Providence’, July 31, 1776

hile many of the signers of the Declaration of Independence spoke of their Christian faith and were members in good standing of various churches, one of them was an ordained minister of the Gospel. He was no ordinary minister. The Rev. John Knox Witherspoon, age 45, had arrived in America from Scotland in 1768 to begin his role as the President of the College of New Jersey at Princeton. He stated that “I became an American the moment I landed.” He was the son of a minister and grandson of a Covenanter minister. His great-great grandfather was John Knox. Contrary to the modern historical attempt to only identify Witherspoon with “Scottish Enlightenment” philosophy, he brought with him to Princeton a Scottish, Reformed, Covenantal, and vital Evangelical Faith, which he sought to impart to all his charges.

Some historians believe Witherspoon became the most influential college president in American history, since nine of the fifty-five delegates to the Constitutional Convention were former students of his; also from among his personally-taught Princeton students came three Supreme Court Justices, ten cabinet officers, twelve members of the Continental Congress, twenty-eight United States Senators and forty-nine members of the U. S. House of Representatives.

On July 31, 1776, two months after he was elected to the Continental Congress, John Witherspoon’s sermon entitled The Dominion of Providence Over the Passions of Men was printed in Philadelphia. “It caused a great stir.” It was preached in response to the Congress’s call for a day of fasting and prayer and dedicated to John Hancock, the President.

The President’s House at Princeton University, where Witherspoon resided from 1768 to 1779

He defined divine providence and explained its extent:

“It extends not only to things which we may think of great moment, and therefore worthy of notice, but t things the most indifferent and inconsiderable. It extends not only to things beneficial and salutary, or to the direction and assistance of those who are the servants of the living God; but to things seemingly most hurtful and destructive, and to persons the most refractory and disobedient. He over-rules all his creatures, and all their actions. . . .I am to point out to you in some particulars, how the wrath of man praises God. I say in some instances, because it is far from being in my power, either to mention or explain the whole. There is an unsearchable depth in the divine counsels, which it is impossible for us to penetrate.”

John Witherspoon Statue at Princeton University

He shows the various ways the wrath of men praise God and cites the times in which they were then living in America—at war with Britain and struggling to gain independence. He calls for his fellow Americans to repent and have faith in Christ, and hearkens to other times in the past when God’s providence changed history in dramatic fashion. Witherspoon’s dynamic sermon concluded with encouragement and hope for the desperate times in which he lived:

“I beseech you to make a wise improvement of the present threatening aspect of public affairs, and to remember that your duty to God, to your country, to your families, and to yourselves is the same. True religion is nothing else but an inward temper and outward conduct suited to your state and circumstance in providence at any time. And as peace with God and conformity to him adds to the sweetness of created comforts while we possess them, so in times of difficulty and trial, it is in the man of piety and inward principle, that we may expect to find the uncorrupted patriot, the useful citizen and the invincible soldier. God grant that in America true religion and civil liberty may be inseparable, and that the unjust attempts to destroy the one, may in the issue tend to the support and establishment of both.

The Doctrine of Providence is a great comfort and these are good words for our times.

View Full Sermon Transcript Here

Visit Princeton University on Our Cradle of Liberty Tour!

Walk the halls of the College of New Jersey (Princeton University) where John Witherspoon trained one-fifth of the members of the Constitutional Convention, and visit the nearby graveyard where such godly luminaries as Jonathan and Sarah Edwards, Samuel Davies, and Ashbel Green are laid to rest. More details forthcoming!

Image Credits: 1 John Witherspoon (Wikipedia.org); 2 Sermon Title Page (Acton.org); 3 President’s House (Wikipedia.org); 4 Witherspoon Statue (Wikipedia.org); 5 Princeton University (Wikipedia.org)<

“You are my King, O God; Command victories for Jacob. Through you we will push back our adversaries; through your name we will trample down those who rise up against us.” —Psalm 44:4, 5

Jenny Geddes Starts a Revolution, July 23, 1637

nside the greatest cathedral in Scotland — St. Giles in Edinburgh — are memorials one might expect to see in such a historically significant site. There is a life-size bronze statue of the Reformer John Knox and the tombs of two bitter enemies buried on either side of the transept (it’s Scotland, after all): the Duke of Argyll, defender of the Covenant and the Marquis of Montrose, warrior of the King. The monument that takes you by surprise, however, is what appears to be a bronze three-legged milking stool on a pedestal next to the help-desk. It was presented to the Cathedral in 1992 by a group of forty Scotswomen. The hurling of a stool at the Cathedral Dean, by Jenny Geddes, as he read from the Prayer Book on July 23, 1637, started a revolution.

St. Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh, Scotland

Panoramic interior image of St. Giles Cathedral

In March of 1625, Charles Stuart, son of King James I, acceded to the throne of England as King Charles I. While he continued many of the policies of his father, he had neither the tact nor the cleverness of his sire. He promoted the high church proclivities he had inherited, increasing the distrust of his Puritan subjects by marrying a Roman Catholic princess (Roman Catholicism was banned in England), dismissed Parliament and ruled by “divine right” without them. He chose as the new Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud, who promoted ceremonies, liturgies, and pomp reminiscent of the papal church.

In Scotland, the reaction to King Charles and his Laudian ecclesiastical innovations met with outrage from the pastors and elders of the Church of Scotland, most of whom were still presbyterian in polity and doctrine. Laud believed the Scottish Kirk should conform to the prelatical system established in England and, for the Scots, became the personification of what Alexander Henderson called a conspiracy of corrupt bishops “to misinform the king of the liturgy and ecclesiology of the Scottish Kirk.” Arminian doctrine was central to the attempted uniformity of religion being imposed by Laud, and the Scots saw it as tantamount to the beliefs of the papal Church.

Jenny Geddes hurls a stool at the Cathedral Dean

On 23 July, 1637 Dean Hannay rose to read the new liturgy in the High Church of Edinburgh, St. Giles. The liturgy had nineteen chapters within its forty-three pages “detailing how the church should be governed, from the King gaining his position from God, down to the renaming of ministers, kirk sessions, and presbyteries with terms taken from the Episcopal Church.” As the pastor began intoning from the prayer book, Jenny Geddes, allegedly a local street vendor, stood up and yelled, “Wha dur say mass in my lug!” (How dare you say the Mass in my ear) and flung her three-legged stool at the minister. Pandemonium broke out as others followed suit and the prelatical entourage fled the scene out a back door. The town guard had to rescue the bishop from the rioters. Similar scenes were enacted in other Scottish towns where the liturgy was read.

Rioting at St. Giles in 1637

The Scots had not experienced a thoroughgoing Reformation seventy years before, just to see it succumb to the heresies of a foreign archbishop and a King usurping the “Crown Rights of King Jesus.” The next year the General Assembly issued the National Covenant, assuring the King of their complete loyalty to him in his proper jurisdiction, but denying his authority over Christ’s Church and the biblical principles of worship. War ensued for the better part of ten years, but the Kirk remained free till the Restoration of the next King, Charles II, when persecution would ensue for about 27 years more.

Stroll down Edinburgh’s Royal Mile to see St. Giles Cathedral, the home of Reformer John Knox, Greyfriars Kirkyard and the majestic Edinburgh Castle on our 2018 Scotland Adventure!

Learn More and Register for the 2018 Scotland Adventure

Image Credits: 1 St. Giles exterior (Wikipedia.org); 2 St. Giles interior (Wikipedia.org); 3 Charles I (Wikipedia.org); 4 James I (Wikipedia.org); 5 Rioting (Wikipedia.org)

“When I consider the heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars which You have ordained. What is man that You are mindful of him?” —Psalm 8:3, 4a

First Walk on the Moon

n the 20th of July, 1969 two United States Astronauts, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin disembarked from their lunar module and stepped onto the moon. Some people believed it was the greatest achievement that man accomplished in history. Some believe it was the most colossal waste of money ever conceived by a government; still others believe it never happened and that NASA bamboozled all the people on earth (except those who claim it did not happen). Whoever is right, or none of the above, the success of the Apollo space program provided an event that billions of people watched or followed in print and which has turned history in a direction formerly found only in the imagination of science fiction writers.

Neil Armstrong works at the LM in one of the few photos taken of him on the moon

The official motivation for landing a man on the moon — as far as the public was concerned — came from President John F. Kennedy who cast the vision in 1961 in a speech before Congress, the text of which came from NASA, calling for a moon landing within a decade. Plenty of preparation had already been fulfilled during the Eisenhower administration with the Mercury unmanned space program, but the first astronaut to fly in space occurred only one month before Kennedy’s speech. The Apollo Program to land men on the moon itself lasted from 1961-1972. Apollo 8 carried the first men to circle the moon and return safely, Apollo 11 landed men on the moon and the program concluded with Apollo 17. Six successful moon landings were conducted in the course of the program.

The spacecraft for Apollo 11 had three components — a command module, Columbia, with a cabin for the three astronauts (the only part that would actually return to earth), a service module which provided propulsion, electrical power, oxygen and water, and a two-part lunar module named the Eagle which carried two of the men to the surface of the moon and returned them to the command module. A Saturn V rocket blasted the spacecraft into orbit.

The Apollo 11 lunar landing mission crew, (L-R) Neil Armstrong, commander; Michael Collins, command module pilot; and “Buzz” Aldrin, lunar module pilot

The whole world watched breathlessly on television till the lunar module landed softly in the “Sea of Tranquility” on the moon’s surface. As Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon he uttered the now iconic phrase, “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” The benefits of spending billions of dollars to accomplish the task have been debated ever since. New commercial products were developed in the course of space R & D, the space race with the Soviet Union was declared over, and several tons of rocks and dust from the moon were brought to earth for people to ooh and ahh over in the Smithsonian Museum. The astonishing complexity and ingenious physics of space travel have spawned movies, new theories of the origin of the universe, and renewed efforts in unmanned space exploration. None of it changes one iota of…

“Then God made two great lights: the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night. He made the stars also. God set them in the firmament of the heavens to give light on the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night and to divide the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. So the evening and the morning were the fourth day.” —Genesis 1: 16-19

Watch Neil Armstrong’s Historic Moon Landing

Image Credits: 1 Neil Armstrong (Wikipedia.org); 2 Apollo 11 Launch (Wikipedia.org); 3 Buzz Aldrin (Wikipedia.org); 4 Apollo 11 Crew (Wikipedia.org);

“And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to His purpose.” —Romans 8:28

Adoniram Judson Arrives in Rangoon, July 14, 1813

t was not until the 19th Century that a significant foreign missionary movement by American evangelical Christians began in earnest. Adoniram Judson, a Massachusetts Congregationalist, was one of the first to take up that call, and on this day sailed into the harbor at Rangoon — the capital of Burma, his destination. His forty years of service in Burma would have astounding results, some of which can be seen today.

A Burmese (Myanmar) Landscape

In his youth, Judson heard the Gospel from his minister-father and devout mother. In college he associated with deists and skeptics and abandoned the faith of his fathers, entranced by the atheistic philosophes of Revolutionary France. A brilliant scholar in his own right, Judson mastered Latin, Greek and Hebrew and graduated as valedictorian of his class, moving on to Andover Seminary, apparently bent on an academic career as a subverter of biblical Christianity. The death of his best friend, full of despair and without hope, arrested the careless Judson and brought him back to the Gospel he had been taught as a child, and he made a profession of faith with determination to use his gifts for the Glory of God. On the mission field the obstacles he would face over the next forty or so years would have deterred or killed a normal man.

On the long and dangerous journey to India, Adoniram and his wife Ann (“Nancy“) came to question their view of baptism. Meeting with the English businessman-missionary William Carey in India, Judson formally changed his views on baptism, resulting in his having to appeal to American Baptists for financial support. With new backing he continued to Burma, having been told that the millions of Burmese were absolutely impervious to the Gospel of Christ. It probably seemed true to Judson, for after twelve years, only eighteen people had professed conversion, and they faced execution for violating the laws against leaving Buddhism.

When the British went to war with Burma, Judson and a fellow missionary were arrested and thrown into a filthy prison for seventeen months. The fact that they were Americans made no difference. They were foreigners and they spoke English, so they were treated as spies. Tortured and diseased, Judson languished in the prison expecting to die. His wife tirelessly petitioned the government to release him. In God’s good providence, he finally was set free and then hired by the Burmese government to help translate for negotiating the treaty that followed the war. So fluent had the missionary become that he translated the New Testament into Burmese and completed half of a Burmese dictionary, still in use there today!

Although only partially successful in Rangoon, Judson found a field ripe unto harvest in the northwestern frontier of the country among the Karen and Kachin people — émigrés centuries before from western China. His powerful ministry — attended by the power of the Holy Spirit — resulted in the establishment of over a hundred churches with more than 18,000 converts. Burma, now called Myanmar, has one of the largest number of Baptists in the world.

After Judson’s faithful wife Anne died, he remarried the widow of a fellow missionary. Together they had eight children, before she died aboard ship on their way to visit their churches in America. He remarried in America and had one child before Judson himself died aboard ship at the age of 61 in 1850. Though buried at sea, his legacy lives on and there are memorials to him scattered across America and Burma.

Book Recommendations for Adoniram Judson

To the Golden Shore, by Courtney Anderson (1987)

Image Credits: 1 Adoniram Judson, 1846 (Wikipedia.org); 2 Burmese Landscape (Pixabay.com); 3 Adoniram Judson (Wikipedia.org); 4 Ann Judson (Wikipedia.org); 5 Salem Harbor (Wikipedia.org); 6 Southeast Asia Map (Wikipedia.org); 7 Judson in Prison (Wikipedia.org); 8 Emily Judson (Wikipedia.org);

“Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another.” —Prov. 27:17

“Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil.” —Ecc. 4:9

The Death of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, July 4, 1826

hey could hardly have been more unlike in appearance and character. Adams was older — short, rotund, sometimes irascible, but “humane, generous and open,” with “a keen sense of humor, an eye for the ridiculous and incongruous, and a willingness to poke fun at himself.” Loyalist Jonathan Sewell said that the Massachusetts firebrand John Adams had a “heart formed for friendship.” A quiet Virginian, Thomas Jefferson was tall and angular, red-headed, modest and courtly. He never gave public speeches and kept a private and reserved demeanor outside his domestic environment. In heated debates, he kept his own counsel while his bombastic New England friend expostulated with drama. Yet they were the men paired by their peers in the Continental Congress to author the Declaration of Independence in 1776. As a mysterious diktat of Providence, they both died on the day of jubilee of that historic document, in 1826. The story of their friendship is one of the most remarkable in American history.

Thrown together at the Continental Congress, Adams and Jefferson impressed their fellow delegates in different ways but their devotion to the cause was such that they were both placed on the committee to write the Declaration. Their friendship matured, however, when both were sent to France, along with Benjamin Franklin, to woo the French government into officially recognizing the United States and provide support in loans and troops. The two men’s passion for liberty under law and willingness to sacrifice their “lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor” in the cause of independence was not all that they had in common, however. They were both men of the soil and loved their farms and their families. Both of their wives bore six children, though Jefferson’s Martha died at the age of thirty-three in 1782 and Abigail Adams lived till 1818 and the age of seventy three.

Declaration of Independence, by John Trumball depicts the five-man drafting committee — including John Adams and Thomas Jefferson — presenting their work to Congress

The two great founders parted ways when their political views diverged as they served in the Washington administration in the last decade of the 18th Century. As one historian began his account of the “tumultuous election of 1800,” Adams and Jefferson could “write like angels and scheme like demons.” Their correspondence and friendship came to end in that bitter “first true presidential campaign.” Adams had always been more favorable to England and Jefferson’s love of France and support of the French Revolution had initially proven a point of contention. The 1800 election highlighted the discordant ideals of the two friends — Jefferson’s ardent republicanism and Adams’s federalism. Apart from a few perfunctory letters between Abigail Adams and Jefferson, the principle founders remained aloof from each other for a number of years.

In 1812, mutual friends gave them occasion to reignite their friendship and it continued unabated till their death on the same day in 1826. The “practical idealist” and the “skeptical realist” both understood their vital roles in creating the Republic and went to their deaths with the other man in their thoughts. Providence has occasionally brought together men whose friendship defined the path of the future.

Watch for dates and details of our 2018 Philadelphia Cradle of Liberty Tour!

Image Credits: 1 Young John Adams (Wikipedia.org); 2 Young Thomas Jefferson (Wikipedia.org); 3 Declaration of Independence (Wikipedia.org); 4 Elderly John Adams (Wikipedia.org); 5 Elderly Thomas Jefferson (Wikipedia.org)