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Out of These Ashes
by John J. Dwyer
- Sometimes of late sorrow and
foreboding have washed over me as I watch powerful men, even leaders
of our country, mock truth and profane the great offices they hold.
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I have been filled with shame as a
selfish, hedonistic people—and church of Jesus Christ—of
which I am a part wink at and accept it, as long as their material
and sensual desires are met.
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And then I have drawn solace and
consolation that others in different ages, more faithful and devout
than I, and oft-times facing far worse evil, have found themselves
aliens in the lands they loved, lands which proved, after all, to be
hostile and strange to them.
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But also that God, whose eternal and
providential plan of history marches inexorably onward, was pleased
not to stay forever His wrath against evildoers, but to nourish and
bless the sacrifices, even in blood, offered by those who would
remain faithful to Him even unto death.
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In the mid-16th Century,
Queen Mary of England, “Bloody Mary,” launched a
terrible persecution against those who remained true to the
principles of the great Protestant Reformation. Specifically, these
English Reformers refused to acknowledge Christ’s actual
physical presence in the elements of wine and bread when served
at the Communion Table.
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Why would these respected men die
unspeakable deaths, leaving their wives widowed and their children
fatherless? Because they believed the afore-mentioned teaching
spoils the blessed doctrine of Christ’s finished work when He
died on the cross. As the great 19th-Century Anglican
Bishop of England J. C. Ryle writes in the classic book Five
English Reformers, a sacrifice that needs to be repeated is not
a perfect and complete thing. Spoiled is the priestly office of
Christ, our High Priest. Exalted are sinful men into the position
of mediators between God and man.
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And thwarted is the doctrine of
Christ’s human nature; for if He is able to be in more places
than one at the same time, then His is not a body like ours at all,
and unable to provide the human sacrifice as “the second Adam”
able to die in the place of God’s elect, to atone for our sin,
and to purchase us from eternal death.
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And so these men whose names we know
not, walked knowingly to hellish deaths. As Vicar John Rogers was
forced to walk past his wife and ten children (one a baby), he
repeated the 51st Psalm, “as if he was walking to
his wedding,” instead of to be burned whole at the stake.
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Bishop John Hooper told a close
friend who urged him to remember that “Life was sweet, and
death was bitter,” that “Eternal life was more sweet,
and eternal death was more bitter.” Rector Rowland Taylor
told his grieving parishioners, “I have preached to you God’s
Word and truth, and am come this day to seal it with my blood.”
Chaplain John Bradford “endured the flames as a fresh gale of
wind in a hot summer day.”
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And then came, to be burned
back-to-back at the same stake, Bishop Nicholas Ridley and Bishop
Hugh Latimer. “Be of good comfort, Master Ridley,”
Latimer said, “and play the man; we shall this day by God’s
grace, light such a candle in England as I trust shall never be put
out.”
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And finally, at the last it was
Thomas Cranmer, the first Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury, and
author of the most beautiful prayer in the English language, the
Morning Prayer from the Book of Common Prayer. Shockingly, he—along
among the English Reformers—at first recanted. Then the Lord
strengthened him, and he preached powerfully to the gather host
until the flames rose about him and he could be seen lifting one
hand toward heaven, and the other, that which had signed his
recantation, he held steady in the fire, repeating again and again,
“This unworthy right hand.”
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Out of these ashes was the gospel
saved in England, and did come the Westminster divines and
Confession, the Puritans, the Pilgrims, and then, when it pleased
God, our beloved America.
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