Great Christian Biographies with John Piper: Jonathan Edwards 1 (featuring Iain Murray)

Edwards Conference and Why Iain Murray Was the Right Biographer

When we conceived of this Edwards Conference, I knew that of all the people in the world that I wanted to be here, Ian Murray was at the top of the list, because in spite of the fact that last night in the panel he probably sounded the most cautious in the appropriation of Edwards for our day, nevertheless, paradoxically, of all the speakers here, I am sure he has done more than anybody else in the last 50 years to see to it that Jonathan Edwards is available and admired, both because he has founded and worked with the Banner of Truth Trust, which has brought out the works of Edwards.

I don't know how many copies of that two-volume work has been sold, but tens of thousands, I'm sure. And he wrote this biography, which you all should take home. Jonathan Edwards, a new biography, new as of 1987.

Ian Murray, this will be around until we all go to be with Jesus, I am sure. This is the biographical place to start. Probably in between something very light and something very, very heavy, this would be the place to go.

And theologically, this nails it. And so he has done not only the publishing of the works of Edwards, he has summed up his life for us. So, when I thought, who shall we have to come talk about life and legacy, this was the man.

And I want to thank you, Ian, for agreeing to be with us. I'll tell you honestly, there is no one whose biographical sketches verbally I have enjoyed more or profited from more over the years. I grab any tape I can get my hand on where Ian Murray is telling somebody's story.

There is another little thing you should know. This is an Edwards-focused conference, but most recently, since this is also the 300th anniversary of John Wesley this year, Ian Murray has written a book entitled Wesley and the Men Who Followed Him.

So, if you wondered whether the appreciation capacities and levels of extent of what we can read and profit from would only be the narrow Calvinistic divines, then take note and go look at what he wrote about Wesley in the past year.

Ian Murray was the assistant pastor to Martin Lloyd-Jones and of course wrote the definitive biography there as well. He served in two other pastorates in England and Australia. He lives with Jean, who is here with him in Edinburgh today, travels extensively ministering with his unique gifts to the benefit of the church.

And as he comes to talk about Jonathan Edwards, the life, the man, and the legacy, would you welcome.

Ezekiel, Malachi, and 1 Corinthians on God’s Word and Ministry

Ian Murray? Let us read the word of God. A few passages from Old and New Testament. Reading first in Ezekiel chapter 22. And I shall read at verse 23. Ezekiel 22 and the 23rd verse. And the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Son of man, say unto her, Thou art the land that is not cleansed, nor rained upon in the day of indignation.

There is a conspiracy of her prophets in the midst thereof, like a roaring lion ravening the prey. They have devoured souls. They have taken the treasure and precious things. They have made her many widows in the midst thereof.

Her priests have violated my law and have profaned mine holy things. They have put no difference between the holy and the profane. Neither have they showed difference between the unclean and the clean, and have hid their eyes from my sabbaths, and I am profaned among them.

Her princes in the midst thereof are like wolves ravening the prey, to shed blood and to destroy souls and to get dishonest gain. And her prophets have daubed them with untempered mortar, seeing vanity and divining lies unto them, saying, Thus saith the Lord God, when the Lord hath not spoken.

In Malachi chapter 2 we have the words that are written on a memorial stone to Jonathan Edwards in the First Church in Northampton, Massachusetts. The words are these,. My covenant was with him of life and peace, and I gave them to him for the fear wherewith he feared me, and was afraid before my name.

The law of truth was in his mouth, and iniquity was not found in his lips. He walked with me in peace and equity, and did turn many away from iniquity. And finally, 1 Corinthians chapter 2, the first five verses,.

And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God. For I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ and him crucified.

And I was with you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. And I was with you in weakness and in fear, and my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power.

Dates That Mark a Christian Life

I think if we could all be able to speak of our personal lives together, there would be certain dates that would stand out. Perhaps the time of our conversion, perhaps the date of our marriage, perhaps the death of some dear family member.

But for Christians, as we were saying last night in the discussion, there are other dates that stand out. And among those dates, so often has been the date when we were led to an author that did something to our lives so that we weren't the same again.

Many Christians have written that in connection with the man whose birth we are commemorating, born 300 years ago. 22nd of June in the year 1832, Robert Murray McChain wrote in his diary, I bought Jonathan Edwards' works.

It's a date he never forgot. The books were his companions for the rest of his comparatively short life. One day in the year 1929, Martin Lloyd-Jones was waiting for a train in Cardiff in South Wales.

He found that he had time to spare, and as pastors are inclined to do, he made his way to a second-hand bookshop. The day after, he went to the shop of John Evans, and he wrote that down on his knees in a corner of the shop, wearing his heavy overcoat as usual, there he said, I found the two-volume 1834 edition of Edwards, which I bought for five shillings.

I devoured these volumes and literally just read and read them. And other lives could be similarly quoted that remembered this date. Now, Robert Murray McChain, when he started to read Edwards, and to read Edwards' life, had an experience that it may be we've all had.

It can be quite discouraging to read or to hear the biography of another Christian. McChain wrote, how feeble does my spark of Christianity appear beside such a sun? But then he went on to say, but even his was a borrowed light, and the same source is still open to me.

And that changes the whole perspective, doesn't it? If Jonathan Edwards could speak to us, he would tell us that we're wasting time to look at the borrowed light. We must go to the source, and that is what we are seeking to do together, are we not, in these few days.

Jonathan Edwards as Sinner, Christian, Minister, and Teacher

If you look at Edwards from the wrong standpoint, everything is wrong. Sometimes people look at him in terms of a great 18th century figure, thinker, writer, preacher, and that's as far as they go. But we have to look at Edwards, first of all, as a sinner, who by the grace of God was made a Christian, and then called to be a minister of the word of God.

We have to see Edwards as a member of the kingdom of Christ, and a teacher of divine revelation. And when we come to him in that way, we find something that is abiding and permanent. Edwards said, the wisdom of God was not given for any particular age, but for all ages.

That's what justifies, surely, our meeting. I like the story of something that happened in Stockbridge in the year 1870. About 200 of Edwards' descendants had met for commemoration. And we read that it was a charming afternoon, with polite addresses given, and tea was drunk, and all was pleasant.

But there was one man there who was not at all comfortable in this situation, and his name was Irenaeus Prime. And because one speaker couldn't come, Dr. Prime was given an opportunity to give a short address.

And this is the gist of what he said. He said, it's no good making a mere bow to past history. What Edwards preached is relevant to every age. Quote, it has the life of Christ in it. It subordinates reason to divine authority, and adores the Holy Spirit.

His theology has revivals and repentance and salvation from hell in it. And this made it, he said, and makes it, and will keep it, divine theology, till Christ is all in all. And suddenly, I think, the pleasant afternoon at Stockbridge came to life.

Jonathan Edwards’s Family Background and Early Education

So we have to look at Edwards' life, man, and the legacy. He was born about 70 years after the Puritans had first colonized what became New England. Lived the first 12 years of his life with his father, Timothy, mother Esther Edwards.

His father was the pastor of the church at East Windsor, close to the Connecticut River. Pastor was a faithful man, good student, part-time teacher, part-time farmer. Mother, busy as all mothers, she had four girls, and then she had Jonathan, and then she had another six girls.

And these girls, it is said, were all six foot in height, and so the local people used to talk about the 60 feet of Mr. Edwards' girls. They were certainly a large family, and besides the immediate circle, there was a larger family circle.

His grandfathers, both of them were still alive. They had been born in the 1640s. They were representatives of the old Puritan age. One of them, as you may well know, was Solomon Studdart, who was a minister of the church at Northampton, the largest church, it is said, in New England.

Edwards had a happy childhood, healthy childhood, a lot of feminine company to look after him as a boy. When he was not quite 13, he went downriver to the collegiate school of Connecticut, which became, very soon after, Yale College at New Haven.

Two years after, he had started a career at Wethersfield, they went to New Haven, and the famous Yale College was thus started. In the year 1720, when he had completed his BA studies, it was decided that he would go forward for another two years to study his Master of Arts degree.

Edwards’s Conversion and Call to Ministry

The next year, the spring of 1721, when he was 17 years old, came the great turning point in his life. He had always been religious. He had made, as he said, a number of resolutions, but the truth was that his natural pride had never been humbled, and his heart had never been changed.

But in the spring of 1721, he says, I was brought to a new sense of things, to an inward sweet delight in God, and divine things, quite different from anything I had ever experienced before. I began to have a new kind of apprehension and idea of Christ, and the work of redemption, and the glorious way of salvation by him.

He went home that summer of 1721, and there's a beautiful passage in his writing in which he describes how everything seemed so different. Even walking in the fields around their home, things weren't the same.

As I was walking there, looking up, he says, to the sky and clouds, that came into my mind so sweet a sense of the majesty and grace of God that I know not how to express. I seem to see them both in a sweet conjunction of holy majesty and majestic meekness, a high and great and holy gentleness in creation.

Simultaneously at this time, there was born in his heart his lifelong concern for the advance, for the promotion of the kingdom of Christ. Before concluding his MA studies, a change of direction came.

He was invited to go to New York to supply an infant Presbyterian congregation, and happily he went, and we have now in the Yale edition of Edwards' works some of the sermons he preached when he was only 18 or 19 years of age.

They are remarkably mature sermons. But for some reason his father wasn't happy with having him so far away. I think he thought his preparation was not yet complete. So 1723, when he was 20 years of age, Edwards is back in Connecticut, and in 1724 to 1726, he is acting as a tutor at Yale College.

Northampton, Sarah Edwards, and the State of the Church

1726 came a great milestone. His grandfather, Solomon Stoddart at Northampton, was now 83 years of age in great need of an assistant. Thoughts turned to this young man in New Haven. So 1726, Jonathan Edwards joined his grandfather.

The next year he was confirmed as pastor alongside him. In the meantime, something even more important had happened. As teenagers, he had fallen in love with a young lady in New Haven, Sarah Fairpoint, and they married in the summer of 1727.

She was 17 years old. She wore a pea green satin brocade dress. And I have to tell you now that I'm only giving you not even half of Edwards' life this morning, because at least half of the life is made up of Sarah.

And to get that half, you're going to have to listen to the tape by Mrs. Piper this afternoon, if you're not present at that session. Sarah Edwards is a good half of Edwards' whole life. So they settled in a house on a rural lane in Northampton, which later became Kingstree.

Northampton was a town of about 200 houses, about a thousand or more people, men, women, children. The first settlers who went there were all given four acres of land each. They shared common pasture as well.

When Edwards did settle, they were given 10 acres, reflecting his position as a minister in the town. And so they settled down for what was to be 23 years of labor in Northampton. First seven years, hard work, much happiness.

First child was born in 1728 and was followed by his father, soon by others there were eight daughters and three sons. But as Edwards came to know the congregation, something gave him increasing concern.

His grandfather had been the minister there for upwards of 60 years, and perhaps inevitably on account of his age. But Northampton had come, the congregation, to settle on its eminent reputation. Edwards did not find the spiritual state of the congregation what he had anticipated.

His grandfather died in 1729, and so Edwards had the whole charge of the congregation. It's quite clear from his sermons that he came to believe there were numbers present. Of course, there was only one church in the town, and everybody in Northampton literally went to church.

He came to believe that there were many nominal believers. Listen to a sentence or two from him. He says, speaking of some who were present, they come to meeting from one Sabbath to another and hear God's word, but all that can be said to them won't awaken them, won't persuade them to take pains that they may be saved.

And often he feared these people weren't even listening. They are, he says, gazing about the assembly, minding this and other person that is there, or they are thinking of their worldly business. This situation changed quite suddenly in 1734.

A great and earnest concern about the great things of religion and the eternal world became universal in all parts of the town. The world was only a thing by the by. Edwards believed that some 300 people hopefully had been converted within six months.

His hope was that the greater part of persons in this town above 16 years of age are such as have a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ. For months the meeting house was filled with praise, with anxious souls, with men and women coming to profession of saving faith.

Edwards wrote a letter to Benjamin Coleman in Boston about what had happened. Coleman wrote back and asked him could he make it larger. And when Edwards made it larger, Coleman sent the letter to London and it was published as the title that was mentioned last night, A Narrative of Surprising Conversions.

The book was widely read. Wesley read it, Whitfield read it, and it instantly made Edwards and Northampton people that figured on the world stage. It had some, it had some positive consequence that hadn't been anticipated.

It had perhaps more than one consequence and they weren't all positive. One negative consequence was this. Solomon Stoddart, the grandfather, had 12 children. They all married, many of them to other clergy, and a large part of the descendants were married to the Williams family.

For one reason or another at this time, a sort of family disagreement arose between the Williams and Edwards. It would appear that the sudden celebrity of this young man perhaps did not go well with some of the other larger family.

At any rate, the fact is that from about the time of the publication of this book onwards, Edwards had difficulty from some of the wider family circle. We'll come back to that. But the sort of thing that happened was that when difficulties arose in the congregation, there were family members, not actually in the congregation, but quite nearby that didn't help, to put it mildly.

Well, you know revivals don't last. Edwards says they're special seasons of mercy. And after the revival of 1734, 35, eventually hence, returned more to normal in Northampton, the usual pastoral difficulties arose, some discouragement to Edwards.

There was an element of party strife in the town that had gone on for some while and kept reappearing. This went on with ups and downs until 1740. In that year, you may recall, one historian says, like a clear bolt out of a, like a sudden bolt out of a clear blue sky, there came the great awakening.

Concern, spiritual hunger, not simply in Northampton, it didn't begin in Northampton, but it spread from different points down the eastern seaboard. It was said in Boston that such was the consciousness of God and the fear of God that you could have left bars of gold on the pavement and no one would have moved them.

The great awakening, 1740 to 1742. And Edwards was at the heart of it in New England, preaching, traveling, itinerating, writing letters, going to New Haven, producing books. He talks about his prodigious labors.

Somebody thought he'd be dead before he was 40 years old. It is amazing what he was able to do. Two of his most important books came out of that time, The Distinguishing Marks of the Work of the Spirit of God and his thoughts on the revival in New England.

Let me give you a sentence. He said, God is pleased sometimes in dealing forth spiritual blessings to his people, in some respects to exceed the capacity of the vessel in its present scantiness, so that he not only fills it but he makes that cup run over.

It has been with the disciples of Christ for a long season, a time of great emptiness on spiritual accounts. They have gone hungry and have been toiling in vain during a dark night of the church, as it was with the disciples of old, Luke 5.

But now, but now the morning being come, Jesus appears to his disciples and gives them such an abundance of food that they are not able to draw their net, yay, yay, so that their nets break and the vessel is overloaded.

That's his picture of the great awakening. They had been toiling, preaching faithfully. God, in his mercy, revived the church and the nets broke and the vessels, the ships could hardly hold what came in.

So it was a time of great blessing.