The Hidden Smile of God by John Piper

Author:John Piper [Piper, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Biography, Religious, Autobiography
ISBN: 9781433501890
Google: HPbl1Fzxf-IC
Amazon: 1433501899
Publisher: Crossway
Published: 2008-02-14T22:00:00+00:00

And in his hands and feet, the cruel scars.

With gentle force soliciting the darts,

He drew them forth, and heal’d, and bade me live.

Since then, with few associates, in remote

And silent woods I wander, far from those

My former partners of the peopled scene;

With few associates, and not wishing more. 28

What would he mean in 1784, twelve years after the “fatal dream,” that Jesus had drawn the arrows out and healed him 28

Ibid., p. 302.

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“The Clouds Ye So Much Dread Are Big with Mercy”

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and bade him live? Were there not moments when he truly felt this and affirmed it against the constitutional gloom of his own mind?

Even in the 1790s there were expressions of hope. From time to time he gave evidence, for example, that he was permitted by God “once more to approach Him in prayer.” His earliest biographer and friend said that in the days of that last decade God had once more opened a passage for him, but that “spiritual hounds”

haunted him at night.29

And there was horrible blackness for him much of the time.

He wrote to John Newton (friend to the end!) in 1792 that he always seemed to be “scrambling in the dark, among rocks and precipices, without a guide. Thus I have spent twenty years, but thus I shall not spend twenty years more. Long ere that period arrives, the grand question concerning my everlasting weal or woe will be decided.”30 This is bleak, but it is not the settled reproba-tion we read about in 1786.

A Castaway?

Three years later on March 20, 1799, he wrote his last original poem, with the seemingly hopeless title “The Castaway.” It tells the story of a sailor washed overboard in a storm. His comrades desperately try to throw him something to hold on to. But the ship cannot be stopped in the wind and leaves the castaway behind, treading water in the darkness. He survives for an hour calling out in vain. Then “by toil subdued, he drank / The stifling wave, and then he sank.”

29

Ibid., pp. 368, 374.

30

Ibid., p. 376.

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T H E H I D D E N S M I L E O F G O D

This is clearly meant by Cowper to be a parable of his own forsaken and doomed condition. The last two verses make the application to himself:

I therefore purpose not, or dream

Descanting on his fate,

To give the melancholy theme

A more enduring date:

But misery still delights to trace

Its semblance in another’s case.

No voice divine the storm allayed,

No light propitious shone,

When, snatched from all effectual aid,

We perished, each alone:

But I beneath a rougher sea,

And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he. 31

There is something paradoxical about this statement of

despair. The fact that he wrote it at all shows that his spirit was not wholly paralyzed with meaninglessness and emptiness. He is still strangely alert and responsive to the world. A man cannot write a beautiful poem who has lost all his joy in beauty. What kind of

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