‘LIKE JOHN IN THE EMPTY SEPULCHRE, I SAW, AND BELIEVED’
IN a never-to-be-forgotten Sabbath morning the Laird of
Brea was holding family worship in his Highland home in the Black Isle. He gave
out and his assembled household sang his favourite Sabbath morning psalm :-
‘Thou hast, 0 Lord, most glorious, Ascended up on high.’ And then he
asked his son, who was at home from college, to read aloud his father’s
favourite Sabbath morning chapter. But when the reader came to the eighth verse
of that great chapter his father heard no more that morning, for these words of
that verse: ‘That other disciple also went into the sepulchre, and he saw,
and believed ‘ - these words, somehow, took such a sudden and such a
complete hold of Fraser’s heart that morning that all that day, in the
house, and by the way, and in the church, and till he fell asleep late that
night, he thought of nothing else but ‘He saw, and believed.’
Fraser had read the Resurrection chapter a thousand times; but, somehow,
his eyes were opened that morning to the eighth verse of that chapter as never
before. Till in The Book of the Intricacies of his Heart, and in some hitherto
unpublished papers of his, Fraser has left many memoranda, written from that
Sabbath morning, some of which I will now reproduce to you for your learning.
Fraser often wondered at his own stupidity in having up to that morning so
completely overlooked that so remorseful, so significant, and so suggestive
verse. Not that he had been wholly blind to the glorious conteit. For it had
been his devout wont to take his household through that great Resurrection
chapter; himself seeing, and then doing his best to make them all see, the
whole adorable scene. He had often pictured to them with what a holy joy our
Lord would receive His returning life back again from His Father’s hands
that first Lord’s Day morning. Just, Fraser would say, as our Lord was
wont to receive His returning life from His Father’s hands every new
morning for the past three and thirty years, when He again awoke from last
night’s sleep. With His last breath, three days before, our Lord had said
: - ‘ Father, into Thy hands I cornmend my spirit.’ And now He
received back His spirit for ever from those hands into which He had delivered
it up on the Cross.
And though it is not written by any of the four
evangelists in so many words, Fraser had been wont to say to his listening
household that for his part he believed that all the time our newly awakened
Lord was putting off the linen clothes, and the napkin that was wrapped about
His head, and was folding them all neatly up as His mother had taught Him to do
from a child; and all the time the shining One was rolling back the stone from
the door of the Sepulchre, our Risen Lord was singing to Himself David’s
Sabbath morning psalm, as His wont had been every Sabbath morning in Nazareth
where He was brought up. ‘I will praise Thee, for I am fearfully and
wonderfully made. Marvellous are Thy works o my God, in me, and that my soul
knoweth right well. How precious, also, are Thy thoughts unto me, 0 my God! How
great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they are more in number than
the sand; when I awake I am still with Thee.’
And, then, as soon as
the stone was rolled away, the Resurrection and the Life stepped out into the
light of the Lord’s Day, with His glorious body clothed from head to foot
with garments of immortality. James Fraser’s anointed eyes had seen all
that, and he had told his rejoicing household all that, on a thousand Sabbath
mornings. But these overlooked words, ‘that disciple saw, and
believed,’ these striking words had, somehow or other, never before taken
hold of his mind and his heart as they did that memorable morning, as you will
see immediately, if I am successful in setting this remarkable man before you
this evening.
As the devout and thoughtful laird of Brea came home from
church that Sabbath evening and as he walked about alone in his beautiful
grounds as the sun was setting, personal application after personal application
of that morning’s text took complete possession of his mind and his heart,
till he stopped in his walk time after time, and took out his tablets and made
entry after entry of those personal applications on the sacred spot. Some of
those personal applications, so far as I know, have never been recovered from
that day to this, till to-night. Now, this is the first pencil-entry for that
Sabbath night. I give it, as I have been able to decipher it from an
unpublished and an almost illegible manuscript. ‘Even the beloved
disciple did not believe till he saw,’ writes Fraser’s
pencil. ‘Even the disciple who leaned on Jesus’ bosom at Supper
did not, up to that resurrection morning, know the Scriptures that his Master
must rise again from the dead. And,’ adds Fraser, ‘I
have been but too like that disciple in my long unbelief.’ Then
follow some instances of Fraser’s long unbelief, till, like John, he was
compelled to believe by what he saw displayed before his eyes. And the first
entry of what Fraser did not believe till he lived to see it and to write it,
was the great blessing for Fraser’s soul that was bound up in his daily
cross. He never puts its name on his daily cross in any of his most
confidential writings that I possess. But I can see on every page how that
daily cross, whatever it was, ate and ate into his heart continually till he
sometimes all but bled to death under it.
The author of The Book of the
Intricacies of his own Heart did not always agree with the author of The
Saints’ Rest in some of the deep and obscure doctrines of that day. But
God soon made those two eminent saints of His to agree completely about His
wisdom and His love toward them in their daily crosses. And He led them both to
fall back on his much-experienced servant Martin Luther in this same matter.
Both Fraser and Baxter were far happier at home than Luther was. You will have
read the exquisitely beautiful letter that the reformer wrote to his little son
about the paradise that is prepared for all good boys and girls. And your
hearts must have bled as you went on to read what a daily cross that boy lived
to be to Luther to the end of his days on earth. ‘My daily cross at home
is my best schoolmaster,’ says Luther all his ilays. ‘And,’ says
Richard Baxter, writing to us out of the same experimental school, ‘when a
man’s daily cross once comes home to him from God’s hand it speaks to
him far more powerfully and far more prevailingly than the best preacher can
ever speak.’ ‘What hot hearts we all have for the things of this life
till our daily cross cools them !‘ exclaims Baxter. ‘God comes and
makes some great cross to crash in upon our children, or upon our health, or
upon some of our possessions, till we are taught to set our affections on
things above.’ And Fraser agrees with Baxter in that; till I find them
exclaiming together; I take their words verbatim from their own paradoxical
lips: ‘0 healthful sickness! 0 comfortful sorrow ! 0 gainful loss! O
enriching poverty! Yes! 0 blessedest day in my whole earthly life, when my
all-sanctifying cross was bound by God’s own hands on my bleeding back,
and never to be taken off my bleeding back till all its God-appointed work was
wrought in me!’
Yes, the only wise God knew quite well what He
was doing when He took the best tree in all the Black Isle and manufactured it
into the Laird of Brea’s lifelong cross. There are more applications than
one that Fraser makes of this new text of his. But before I leave this first
application of his must I copy out this additional entry; this penitential
prayer, ‘Shut and seal Thine ears, 0 my God, against all my
rebellious complaints and prayers,’ he says. ‘Never
mind what I cry in my agony when I forget myself and when I again kick out
against Thy holy will with me. Whatever I spend the night watches importuning
Thee for, turn Thy deafest ear toward my cry. Never, never yield to me in my
madness. Never, never remove that sufficiently sore cross of mine; no, not for
an hour, tilt I have learned to say under it, Thy will be done! No, no, take
not my cross away, on any plea of mine, till it has completely, and for ever,
worked out my salvation in me, as that sanctified cross of mine only can.’
‘I came to see God, not man, in my daily cross,’ writes
Fraser, ‘I never understood the Scriptures about my daily cross till
an exegesis and a commentary of those deep Scriptures was written out, by
myself, in my own tears, and in my own blood.’
That, then, was
Fraser’s first personal application that he had to see fulfilled in
himself before he would believe it. He had to see how his salvation was bound
up in his daily cross before he would believe that. And then from that sight of
his daily cross Fraser at last came to see the same divine wisdom and the same
divine love in absolutely all things that came to him. He had been wont to pass
over that great passage in Paul with a smile - that great passage where that
great experimentalist says that all things work together for good to God’s
true people.
Fraser had been wont to smile at that passage and to say to
himself, ‘Would God it were so with me!’ But as God would have it
Brea became at last as bold a preacher of that high doctrine as the apostle was
himself. Take this passage from the intricacies of Fraser’s heart.
‘I was wont,’ he writes, ‘to dwell, and with
no little bitterness, on some of my domestic and financial difficulties. But as
time went on, and as I more and more learned to take all these things
immediately from God’s hand to me, I came to see and to confess to God and
to myself, that both my father and my mother, and my brothers, and my sisters,
and my brothers-in-law, and my wife, and my children, and, indeed, all my
relationships and all my circumstances were the very best possible for me, and
for God’s purposes with me. And if any of my people in any of their
tempers or in any of their habits or in any parts of their behaviour were not
wholly and in everything to my mind I at last learned of God to adapt and
modify myself to them in all things as I saw they had to adapt and modify
themselves to me. And when under any temptation I again fell from my equanimity
and made my complaint and my accusation to Christ, He would take me to the
Gospels and would ask me if I thought that His father, and His mother, and His
brethren, and His sisters, and His brothers-in-law always believed in Him, and
always gave Him His own way in the life of His family. Also He pointed out to
me that as often as His home cross was too heavy for Him to bear, that night He
stole out of the city and went up into a mountain apart, and came back to
Nazareth next morning and took up His cross and went about His day’s work
as if He had never seen a cross. And, that night,’ adds our
autobiographer, ‘I again saw, and believed that all things work
together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according
to His purpose. Yes, off and on about that time, I so saw as ever after to
believe that God was giving His whole mind to my case and was guiding and
administering my case for me as if He had not another sinner in all the world
to sanctify and to save but me. And till, I remember, I said in those days
seven times every day: ‘No! no! not my rebellious will in any of those
things be done, but Thy holy will alone!’ I could keep you here all night
over Fraser’s illustrations of the text that he had to see before he would
believe. Concerning some of his lifelong accumulations of unanswered prayer and
that for some clearly promised things, he writes thus: ‘I
came at last to see and to acquiesce that as to the when and the how of the
answer is for God’s discretion and not for my dictation. I came to see
that my only business is to continue to be believing and importunate in my
prayer. And at last I got a quiet heart by insisting with myself that God will,
no doubt, attend to His business if I attend to mine. I came to see that my
business is to pray on, and not to faint. I learned to pray importunately, and
yet all the time not to intrude on things far too high for me.’ Nay, not
only all that, but this astonishing man so learned to love pure prayer that he
continued to pray for things even after he had long seen that the answer was
never to come in this life; and, indeed, till he was quite satisfied to live
contentedly and to die quietly without the answer. ‘I saw the blessedness
of pure and defecated prayer,’ he says; ‘I saw that in
my own case till I could not but believe it.’ You would not believe me if
I told you how old this man of God was before he gave himself up wholly to the
Word of God. I can scarcely believe my own eyes when I read that he had been
wont to give up the last hour of every night to late suppers at Brea, and to
healthing, and to playing at cards, and to other time-killing games. But God so
handled him as to teach him that there was a better way than that for a man
like him. ‘I spent my last hour last night on the fourteenth of
John,’ he writes to Thomas Ross of Tam. ‘I have known
that chapter from a child; but it never took such a hold of my heart as it did
last night. Till when my clock struck twelve, I remembered how David spent his
night watches, till he wrote and said: “Blessed is the man whose delight
is in the law of the Lord; and in his law doth he meditate day and night.”
And when I was on my knees about all that at my bedside this of Paul to Timothy
also came into my mind: “From a child thou hast known the Holy Scriptures,
which are able to make thee wise unto salvation.” And, about the
same time, writing to Thomas Ross, he says: ‘I do not know how it is
with you nowadays, but I go to bed now with a quiet heart and with a good
conscience. And I sleep much sounder than I was wont to do after a night’s
healthing. And I awake next morning with a better taste in my
mouth.’ Our autobiographer came to see all that till he believed
it and acted upon it to a rich and ripe old age. But the thing that Fraser was
slowest and longest in seeing and believing, if ever he came to see it and to
believe it aright, was to see and believe God’s wisdom and His love in
permitting such a slow and such a stagnant and such an often backsliding
sanctification in His best people. Why does the God Who so loves holiness, and
Who loves nothing else, why does He not go on to perfect what He has so
certainly begun? Year after year to his sin- wearied-out old age the holy law
of God plunged deeper and deeper into Fraser’s depraved heart till he was
wellnigh driven to absolute despair. He saw the unspeakable evil of sin; its
malignity, its depth, and its absolute unsearchableness, the curse of it, and
the living hell of it. But along with that he came to see Christ, as, but for
his awful sinfulness, he would never have seen Him. He came to see
Christ’s sin-atoning blood and His justifying righteousness as he would
never have seen that blood and that righteousness but for his long life of such
slow and stagnant and backsliding sanctification. And all that more and more
weaned his holiness-loving heart from the sweetest and best things of this
life, and drew up his heart more and more to that land and that life where no
sin shall ever enter, and where God shall wipe off all tears from His
people’s sanctified and glorified eyes. And this went on till he died in
faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off.
Wherefore, for all these things, God is not ashamed to be known in Scotland as
the God of James Fraser of Brea.