Leap off the Ladder

“But where sin abounded, grace did much more abound” — Romans 5:20 (KJV)

In those years England had brought back the king, and new laws said worship had to follow the Church of England. Preachers like Bunyan who would not stop holding their own meetings could be arrested. In November 1660, after about five years of preaching, Bunyan was arrested at a meeting of believers in the countryside before he could preach. He was charged with holding “unlawful assemblies and conventicles,” meaning illegal religious meetings. He could have gone free if he promised not to preach. He would not. So he went to Bedford gaol, and he stayed there for twelve years.

By then his first wife had died, and he had married again; his second wife, Elizabeth, was left at home with four children, the eldest his daughter Mary, who had been born blind. Bunyan does not soften what this cost. “The parting with my wife and poor children hath often been to me in this place as the pulling the flesh from the bones.” Above all he worried about “my poor blind child, who lay nearer my heart than all beside.”

Listen to him: “Poor child! thought I, what sorrow art thou like to have for thy portion in this world! Thou must be beaten, must beg, suffer hunger, cold, nakedness, and a thousand calamities, though I cannot now endure the wind should blow upon thee.” He felt “as a man who was pulling down his house upon the head of his wife and children; yet thought I, I must do it, I must do it.” He believed God would care for them if he stood firm. But he never pretends it was easy, or that his family did not pay for his choice. They did.

Early on, not knowing the law, he feared he might be hanged. For weeks he felt nothing of God at all, and he was afraid that if he climbed the gallows ladder he would shake and go pale, and shame the gospel. Then he settled it. God could choose whether to comfort him; Bunyan's job was to stand firm. “If God doth not come in, thought I, I will leap off the ladder even blindfold into eternity, sink or swim, come heaven, come hell, Lord Jesus, if thou wilt catch me, do; if not, I will venture for thy name.” He remembered how Satan had sneered that Job only served God for what he got out of it, and decided that serving God even with nothing in return was the sign of an honest heart.

Prison also gave him the closest time with God of his whole life. “I never had in all my life so great an inlet into the Word of God as now.” It was there that he wrote this book, and years later came The Pilgrim's Progress, which tells the same journey as a story. He was released in 1672, and died in 1688.

He ends with honesty, not a victory lap. He still finds “seven abominations” in his heart, starting with “Inclinings to unbelief.” Sometimes a single line of the Bible was more than he could take in; other times “the whole Bible hath been to me as dry as a stick.” But he had learned where to run. “Of all tears, they are the best that are made by the blood of Christ.”

Bunyan's story doesn't end with a man who never doubts again. It ends with a man who knows that his hold on God was never the thing keeping him safe. God's hold on him was. Faith, in the end, looked like jumping blindfold, trusting Christ to catch him, with or without the feelings.

One thing to do this week: write a short honest prayer in Bunyan's style: “Lord Jesus, if thou wilt catch me, do.” Then name one thing you are afraid of, and one person (like Bunyan's Mary) you want to trust God with. Pray it every day this week.