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Where does hope come from when the life you’ve built is ripped away from you and you’re likely to never get it back?
Maybe for you it is a job, or your health, or a ministry, or a relationship, or a reputation. Most of us carry grief over some version of the question.
In the summer of 1636, a Scottish pastor named Samuel Rutherford was put on trial by a church court that answered to the king. His crime was refusing to obey the crown’s rules for how Scottish churches should worship and what their ministers could teach. On July 27, the court delivered his sentence. At age thirty-six, he was stripped of his ministry and banished to Aberdeen, a city on the far side of Scotland from everyone and everything he knew. He had spent the previous nine years pastoring a small farming parish called Anwoth. And now he was forbidden to preach anywhere in the country. His ministry and his community were taken from him by powerful people who belonged to neither.
The silence of exile nearly broke him. He called his silenced Sundays his “dumb Sabbaths,” and he did not pretend he was okay with being forbidden to preach, which was his first and truest calling. He wrote once to a friend that his dumb Sabbaths burden his heart, and make it bleed. To another he said they were “like a stone tied to a bird’s foot.”
Rutherford worried aloud that God himself had set him aside, that his ministry was finished, that the enemy had “charmed and blasted” his usefulness once and for all. If you have ever been in your prime, yet have been thrust into circumstances that made you feel like your best and most fruitful days were a thing of the past, you know the burden that Rutherford carried.
“Christ’s Palace” in Aberdeen
And yet over time, something new and unexpected began to appear at the top of the letters Rutherford wrote from exile.
He took to writing from what he called “Christ’s palace in Aberdeen.” His place of exile was no longer his prison. Somehow it had become his palace. Over seventeen months of exile he wrote 220 of the 365 letters that survive him. Never intended for publication, they became one of the classics of Christian literature. Charles Haddon Spurgeon, often called the prince of preachers, said they were the nearest thing to divine inspiration to be found in the writings of mere men.
On December 30, 1636, Rutherford wrote hopeful lines including: “I see that grace grows best in winter” and “When I am in the cellar of affliction, I look for the Lord’s choicest wines” and “We may sing beforehand, even in our winter storm, in the expectation of a summer sun at the turn of the year; no created powers can mar our Lord Jesus’ music, nor spill our song of joy.”
Standing In the Eye
Brandi Carlile has a song called "The Eye" that gets at what Rutherford was doing.
She sings that you can dance in a hurricane, but only if you are standing in the eye. The eye is the still center around which the whole storm revolves. Everything related to survival and flourishing depends on standing there in the dead center.
That was Rutherford. He did not “sing in a winter storm” because the storm of his circumstances had passed. He sang from within the storm, because the eye of Rutherford’s proverbial hurricane was the Person and work of Christ himself.
Rutherford did not practice the so-called power of positive thinking. Positive thinking does not result in words like “my dumb Sabbaths.” Rutherford was living in between two events, one past and one future, and letting both tell him the truth about his life at the same time.
Theologians call it the space between the “already” and the “not yet.”
The first event, the one that was already behind him, was the cross.
Most Christians follow the logic of cause and effect: that God loved us, and therefore Jesus died for us. The New Testament reasons in the opposite direction: Jesus’ death is how we know God already loves us. “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). The cross of Christ means God is not observing our suffering from a safe and secure and aloof distance. He has entered into it. In Rutherford’s Aberdeen, the cross answered the question beneath all the exiled minister’s other questions, “Does God love me?”, with an answer that held strong even for a man who felt like a bruised reed and a smoldering wick.
The second event, the one that guaranteed his future, was the resurrection.
The resurrection is about more than Jesus surviving death, as wonderful and miraculous as that is. It is the announcement that God’s future has already begun. Paul calls Christ rising up to life from the grave “the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Corinthians 15:20), the first element of the new creation breaking into the old one. The appetizer before the never-ending feast.
And what does the risen Jesus carry with him? Scars.
He invites Thomas to put a finger in the nail marks themselves (John 20:27). Though Christ has risen and will never again taste the sting of death, his scars remain with Thomas, Rutherford, and us, no longer as a wound but as a witness that Christ has died, Christ has risen, and Christ will come again.
Easter did not erase Good Friday. The wounds of Christ remain, yet are transformed. God does not pretend our cruel winters never happened. But he does redeem them.
This is where Christians actually live, between Friday and Sunday, which is why Paul can call believers “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing” (2 Corinthians 6:10) without so much as a shred of contradiction.
The cross validates the sorrow.
The resurrection guarantees the joy.
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The writer of Hebrews says our hope is “a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain, where Jesus has gone” (Hebrews 6:19-20).
Every other anchor we reach for drops downward, into finite and fickle things like savings accounts and health reports and reputations. But the sure and steady anchor of Christ drops upward, into the glories of heaven itself, and it holds fast because it is fastened to Christ, who is now seated at the right hand of God the Father. The eye of the hurricane and the anchor behind the curtain are one and the same. The anchor of Christ is not the absence of the storm, but the presence and power of Christ inside it.
Heaven Works Backwards
Three centuries after Rutherford, C.S. Lewis gave us language for all of this. In The Great Divorce, Lewis’s guide through heaven is a glorified George MacDonald (even C.S. Lewis had a C.S. Lewis, and his name was George MacDonald), who explains why no earthly suffering will look the same once our glorified future in Christ arrives:
“That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory... The good [and redeemed] man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven.”
The process begins even before death. That is what Rutherford’s letters show. He was not waiting for heaven to reinterpret his exile someday. Heaven was already working backwards into his exile. The banishment was still banishment, the dumb Sabbaths still felt lonely and terribly unfair, and yet the same holding rooms that held his grief were, even then, becoming an eternal palace.
It’s easy to think that the cross is for hard seasons and the resurrection is for hope about heaven, two doctrines for two separate problems. But neither Rutherford nor Scripture will let us maintain such a tidy division.
The cross of Christ steadies us in good seasons as much as in hard ones. It humbles us when everything is going well and reminds us that every blessing came to us by grace. The resurrection guards and protects us in the hard seasons. It keeps us from despair without making us glib or cynical. A Christian in a good season should be the most grateful person in the room. A Christian in a hard season should be the most hopeful. The cross and the resurrection give us both.
Rutherford’s story bears all of this out. In 1638 the tide turned in Scotland, and he was allowed to return home to his beloved Anwoth, then on to a professorship at St. Andrews and a seat among the Scottish commissioners at the Westminster Assembly, from whom we would receive the Westminster Confession of Faith itself.
Good days came once again for Rutherford, and the man from the cellar of affliction enjoyed renewed honor, position, and influence, but without letting any of it spoil him. Then, in 1661, the tide turned against him once more. The newly restored king, Charles II, whose throne Rutherford’s Lex Rex had argued was subject to the law like everyone else, ordered that the book be burned and summoned Rutherford with a charge of treason. Rutherford was on his deathbed when the summons arrived. He sent back word to the king that he had already received a prior summons from a far superior Judge, and that before his court date arrived he would be in the presence of the King of Kings himself. Among his last recorded words:
“I shall shine. I shall see Him as He is.”
Samuel Rutherford died on March 29, 1661, a free man in every way that ultimately mattered. The hurricane spun around him for twenty-five years, faithful ministry, then exile, then honor, then a treason charge. His heart danced through all of it because all along, he never stepped out of the hurricane’s eye.
The winters and storms of life are real. And yet, so is the grace that grows there, and so is the Christ who stands at the eye of it all, summoning you to join him there.
What have you lost that you never expected to get back, and where has hope met you in the middle or the “eye” of it?
My heart was touched… what a deep article on the nevertheless love of our God…. Thank you… will read again!!!
Such a beautiful reminder about Jesus'forever presence regardless of the circumstances, particularly in those dark seasons of life! Thank you for this reminder as we await our Great Hope!