In 1649 King Charles I was executed, and Oliver Cromwell ruled England for eleven years. The Restoration came in 1660 when Charles II mounted the throne of England. The return of the monarchy signaled trouble for all Puritans, and in November, 1660, John Bunyan was put in jail. He was not a man to give up his stand for Christ just to avoid going to jail. Now there are times when the lines are so closely drawn that if we are going to stand for anything, it is going to cost us something. The great tragedy of our generation is that so few people have convictions: and even worse is the tragedy that those who have convictions will not stand for them. Jesus said, "Woe unto you when all men speak well of you."
Thomas Macaulay, in his essay on Bunyan, refers to this paragraph by Bunyan as one of the greatest in English literature. "I walked to a neighboring town and sat on a settle in the street and fell into a very meek pause about the fearful state my sin had brought me to. And after long musing I lifted up my head, but methought I saw as though the sun shining in the heavens did grudge to give me light, and as if the very stones in the street and tiles upon the houses did band themselves against me. Methought that they were all banded together to banish me out of the world. I was abhorred of them, and unfit to dwell among them for I had sinned against the Saviour. Oh, how happy now was every creature over me, for they stood fast and kept their station, but I was gone and lost."
Early in the seventeenth century, a hundred years after the time of Luther, the English Reformation launched the Church of England on its sweet and placid way. After it became quiet, calm, contented, and spiritually dead, there suddenly arose within the church a great movement for more strictness of life and for simplicity of worship. This religious Puritan movement paralleled the political movement which grew into the English Civil War and produced Oliver Cromwell.
In my New York Bible class I was asked the question, "If God is all powerful, could He make a five-year-old tree grow old in ten minutes?" I said, "Why not?" Look at what He did in this case here.
If you will say, "Lord God, here is my zero," God will just come and stand in front of your zero and all of a sudden you will discover that your zero (0) is ten (10). If you can get an accurate enough picture of yourself to say, "Lord, I am two zeroes," He will come and stand in front of you, and all of a sudden your two zeroes (00) will equal one hundred (100). In rare instances in the history of the church, men and women have been able to say, "Lord God, here is my triple zero. (000)." That's how "one can chase a thousand and two put ten thousand to flight." (See Dent. 32:30.)
