Theology Thursday: Precious in the sight of the Lord

Although seventeenth-century people had more first-hand experience of death than we do today, Puritan preachers still worried that people were ill-prepared for it. Puritan funeral sermons therefore challenged listeners to prepare well for death during their lifetime.

Perkins urged believers to live godly lives and make ‘right use of their afflictions’, learning to bear these ‘little deaths’ humbly under God’s sovereignty in preparation for actual death. For, ultimately, an acceptance of death was a recognition of God’s sovereignty. As Perkins commented: ‘‘if God had enacted such a law for the continuance of our lives on earth as is enacted for the continuance of parliament, that we should not be dissolved till our own pleasure… I fear heaven might be empty for the most of us…’!

For Puritan writers, death was rightly to be feared as God’s judgement for sin, and represented a dislocation of the created order. But, for believers, it could also be viewed positively, bringing ‘many worthy benefits’, such as freedom from sin and rest from labours, to the point that Perkins even called the believer’s death ‘a most excellent blessing of God’.

As one anonymous sermon explained: ‘Death by itself considered is indeed the wages of sin.. yet by virtue of the death of Christ it ceases to be a plague and punishment, and of a curse is made a blessing and is become to us… a little wicket [i.e. gate] or door whereby we pass out of this world and enter into heaven.’

In fact, facing death was the ultimate opportunity to put faith into practice: ‘For then true faith makes us to go wholly out of ourselves, and to despair of comfort and salvation in respect of any earthly thing, and with all the power and strength of heart to rest on the pure mercy of God.’

Twenty-first century ministers often have the great privilege of witnessing the same effect in dying believers today. As Sceats summaries: ‘if death is the greatest trial, it is also the greatest opportunity; and the man of faith will greet it as such.’

Sceats, David. “‘Precious in the Sight of the Lord’ : The Theme of Death in Puritan Pastoral Theology.” Churchman 95/4 (1981): 326–39.

[1] Spellings have been modernised.