The Accuser of the Brethren

“For thus saith Jehovah of hosts: After glory hath he sent me unto the nations which plundered you; for he that toucheth you toucheth the apple of his eye.”

— Zechariah 2:8, ASV

A Rebuke in the Middle of a Prayer

Of all the stories told about John Hyde, the one that has done the most good may be the one that shows him at his worst.

It comes from McCheyne Paterson, whose reminiscences in Carré’s book tell it, and it appears again, in almost the same words, in the account McGaw compiled. Carré’s version places it when Hyde was “up in the hills resting for a short time,” praying in his “inner chamber.” McGaw’s leaves out the hills and dates it about 1910. They agree on everything else, and Paterson said Hyde himself used to speak of it “as one of the most direct and solemn lessons God had ever taught him.”

Hyde had been burdened about an Indian pastor. The man’s spiritual life seemed to have gone cold, and his congregation had become as lifeless as their minister. Hyde resolved to give time to definite intercession for him. He went into his room, knelt, and began to pour out his heart to God about the pastor. In Carré’s version his first words were something like, “O God! Thou knowest that brother how —” In McGaw’s they were, “O Father, thou knowest how cold —”

He never finished the sentence. “Cold” was the word he was about to say. But, as McGaw’s version has it, “a finger seemed to be laid on his lips, so that the word was not uttered”, a “Hand,” in Paterson’s telling, and a voice said to him in stern reproach: “He that toucheth him, toucheth the apple of mine eye.”

A great horror came over Hyde. He cried out, “Forgive me, Father, in that I have been an accuser of the brethren before thee!”

The Apple of His Eye

The words that stopped Hyde are adapted from the verse at the head of this chapter. In Zechariah, God speaks of the nations that have plundered his people: “he that toucheth you toucheth the apple of his eye” (Zechariah 2:8, ASV). The “apple of the eye” is the pupil, the most sensitive and carefully guarded part of the body. The phrase occurs elsewhere too. Moses sang of how God found Israel in the wilderness and “kept him as the apple of his eye” (Deuteronomy 32:10, ASV). David prayed, “Keep me as the apple of the eye; hide me under the shadow of thy wings” (Psalm 17:8, ASV).

In Zechariah the warning is addressed to Israel’s enemies. What shook Hyde was that it had been turned on him. He was not an enemy of the pastor. He was praying for him. He meant well. But in the very act of intercession he had begun to list the man’s faults to God, and God had treated it as an attack on someone he held precious.

The phrase Hyde used in his confession, “an accuser of the brethren,” makes the point even more sharply. It comes from the book of Revelation, and it is a name for Satan: “the accuser of our brethren is cast down, who accuseth them before our God day and night” (Revelation 12:10, ASV). Hyde had come to God to do the work of an intercessor. He found that he had been doing the work of the accuser.

The Oldest Sin of the Praying Person

This is a sin that belongs especially to people who pray. It is easy to criticise others in conversation, and most of us know it is wrong. It is much harder to notice when we are doing it in prayer, because prayer feels like a holy activity. We bring someone before God “in concern,” and before we know it we are telling God what is wrong with them. We describe their coldness, their failures, their bad influence, and we ask him to deal with it. The prayer has a spiritual shape. Its content is accusation.

Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector shows the same danger. The Pharisee stood and “prayed thus with himself, God, I thank thee, that I am not as the rest of men” (Luke 18:11, ASV). His prayer was full of comparison and quietly full of contempt. James warns, “Speak not one against another, brethren. He that speaketh against a brother, or judgeth his brother, speaketh against the law, and judgeth the law” (James 4:11, ASV). Jesus himself warns against seeing the speck in a brother’s eye while ignoring the beam in one’s own (Matthew 7:3-5, ASV).

Hyde was one of the most prayerful men of his generation. That did not protect him from this sin. If anything it exposed him to it, because intercessors spend so much time thinking about the spiritual condition of others. Yet his friends were unanimous that criticism of people was not in his character. Jones wrote that he “never heard him criticizing any persons, though he could vehemently denounce sin.” This story is the key to that. The gentleness his friends admired was not natural to him. He had been taught it, abruptly, in the middle of a prayer.

“Show Me What Things Are Lovely”

What Hyde did next is the most important part of the story.

He confessed his sin and claimed, in Paterson’s phrase, “the precious blood of Christ that cleanseth from all sin.” Then he remembered a verse from Philippians: “whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things” (Philippians 4:8, ASV). And he prayed a new prayer: “Father, show me what things are lovely and of good report in my brother’s life.”

The answer came, Paterson says, “like a flash.” Hyde remembered that the pastor had given up everything for Christ, and had endured much suffering from relatives he had left behind for the gospel. He remembered the man’s years of hard work, the tact with which he managed a difficult congregation, the many quarrels he had healed, and what a good husband he was. One thing after another rose up in his mind. And Hyde spent the whole of his time of prayer, which he had set apart for intercession, in thanksgiving for his brother instead. “He could not recall a single petition,” Paterson wrote, “nothing but thanksgiving!”

McGaw’s version adds a further lesson that Hyde drew. He had wanted, he said, to keep the rule of Philippians 4:8 by looking at whatever was lovely in his brother, without giving up his commitment to whatever was true. Surely, he thought, the pastor’s coldness was true? What he came to see was that the sins of God’s children, though real, are passing. They are not their true nature. The true thing about a believer is what he is in Christ, and what he will be when God has finished the work he has begun. Paul wrote to the same Philippians, “he who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Jesus Christ: even as it is right for me to be thus minded on behalf of you all, because I have you in my heart” (Philippians 1:6-7, ASV). To see a fellow believer truly is to see him as God sees him, in the light of what grace will make him.

The Pastor Revived

The story has an epilogue. When Hyde went down from the hills, he heard that the pastor had just then received a great spiritual uplift. According to McGaw’s version, the pastor was preaching again “with fire.” Paterson believed it had happened at the very time Hyde was praising God for him. “While he was praising, God was blessing.”

Paterson made this into a general principle: “While we bless God for any child of His, He delights to bless that one!” We should be careful not to turn that into a mechanism, as though praise were a lever that forces God’s hand. The Bible gives no such formula, and Hyde would not have claimed one. But there is a deep truth here. Criticism, even criticism offered to God in prayer, tends to see people as problems. Thanksgiving sees them as God’s work in progress. And the attitude we take toward people in private prayer shapes, sooner or later, the way we treat them in public.

The Carpenter’s Shop

Paterson told a small parable to explain what Hyde had learned, and it is worth passing on.

Suppose, he said, you walk into a carpenter’s workshop and start pointing out faults in the half-made furniture. “How rough this is! What an ugly corner that is!” The carpenter will be annoyed, and rightly. “Bear in mind,” he will say, “that I am still making these things. They are not yet finished. Come and see the Pattern after which they are being fashioned.” And he will show you finished chairs and tables, perfectly shaped and polished. Who is right, the critic or the carpenter? The critic looks at what is rough and passing. The carpenter looks at what will be.

“Let us remember above all else,” Paterson wrote, “that God’s people on this earth are in the making. This is His workshop and souls are being fashioned and formed in it.” He pointed to the Carpenter of Nazareth, of whom Isaiah prophesied, “A bruised reed will he not break, and a dimly burning wick will he not quench” (Isaiah 42:3, ASV). Jesus, Paterson said, looked at the faint light in his erring disciples rather than at the smoke, and by doing so blew them into flame until they became the light of the world.

Does This Mean Never Correcting Anyone?

Paterson anticipated an objection. “Then should we shut our eyes to the faults of all? Should we never reprove sin?” He answered that our Lord did reprove sin at times, and so must we. The New Testament is full of correction. Paul rebuked Peter to his face. Jesus spoke sternly to the Pharisees and to his own disciples. The church is told to “reprove, rebuke, exhort, with all longsuffering and teaching” (2 Timothy 4:2, ASV). Hyde himself, Jones says, “could vehemently denounce sin.” And in private, during the dispute over public confession at Sialkot, he told Jones plainly that hidden immorality among Christians was more common than anyone imagined.

The lesson Hyde learned was not that sin should be ignored. It was about where correction begins and in what spirit. It begins with honest confession of our own sin. It proceeds with thankfulness for what God is doing in the other person. And any rebuke that follows comes from someone who has first seen his brother as the apple of God’s eye. Galatians gives the order: “Brethren, even if a man be overtaken in any trespass, ye who are spiritual, restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness; looking to thyself, lest thou also be tempted” (Galatians 6:1, ASV). Criticism that has not passed through thanksgiving is usually just accusation.

For Reflection

Most of us pray for people whose faults we know well: a difficult colleague, a disappointing pastor, a wayward relative, a church member who irritates us. It is worth listening, next time, to what we actually say about them to God. Do our prayers sound more like intercession or more like a charge sheet?

Hyde’s remedy is simple enough to try today. Stop in the middle of the complaint. Confess it. Then pray his prayer: “Father, show me what things are lovely and of good report in my brother’s life.” Stay with that prayer until something comes to mind, and then give thanks for it. It may be that, as Hyde found, the whole time of prayer turns into praise. And it may be that, while we are praising, God is blessing.