Grace Abounding is not a conventional autobiography: it is John Bunyan’s “spiritual” autobiography.2 When he wrote Pilgrim’s Progress, besides describing Christian’s journey to the Celestial City, Bunyan was also detailing his own spiritual experience. His personal testimony is a very similar account to that which he relates in the allegory of Pilgrim’s Progress. The state of despair in which Christian finds himself at the beginning of Pilgrim’s Progress resembles that of Bunyan at the beginning of Grace Abounding. Christian had a great burden upon his back; Bunyan had a great burden upon his spirit.
Rev Donald Beaton in the Free Presbyterian Magazine, volume 7, has a series of six articles titled “Some Famous Books and Their Authors”.3 The fourth in the series is Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners.
He begins the article by making this observation regarding the book: “It has by no means obtained such a worldwide reputation as Bunyan’s immortal allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress; nevertheless it is a book bearing the impress of one of the finest writers in our literature, and relates in graphic and eloquent language the long and, at times, terrible experiences of a soul fleeing from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City. In the introduction to the work, he warns against all expectancy of fine literary finish in language characteristic enough. ‘I could also have stepped,’ he says, ‘into a style much higher than this in which I have here discoursed, and could have adorned all things more than here I have seemed to do; but I dare not. God did not play in convincing of me; the devil did not play in tempting me; neither did I play when I sank as it were into a bottomless pit, when the pangs of hell caught hold on me; wherefore I may not play in my relating of them, but be plain and simple, and lay down the thing as it was.’ This is Bunyan’s own estimate of his work, as far as Grace Abounding is concerned.”4
Bunyan’s Conversion.
Bunyan tells how his first serious thoughts about eternity were awakened by reading two fine Puritan books on practical divinity that his wife’s father, a godly man, had left her when he died. They were Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven and Lewis Bayly’s Practice of Piety.5 He then set about reforming himself so that he might be more acceptable in the sight of God. He attended church regularly, adoring with great devotion the priest, the clerk, and the vestments, but the thought that he was a sinner had not as yet crossed his mind. However, the day of salvation was near at hand.
On the Sabbath the pastor preached a sermon on the duty of observing the Lord’s Day and keeping it holy. Bunyan, after hearing the sermon, according to his usual custom proceeded to Elstow Green to play games. He was just beginning a game when, with all the suddenness of a flash of lightning, he heard a voice, as it were, speaking to his soul: “Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to heaven, or have thy sins and go to hell?” He was startled by the solemn question. Around him were his companions, utterly oblivious of what was before his mind. They played their game thoughtless of the momentous truths that were stirring Bunyan’s soul to its depths. There came, immediately after this, the temptation that Christ would not forgive him his transgressions, as he had sinned so greatly against Him.
Sadly, he concluded that there was no hope for him and that he would abandon himself to drift down the stream with the world. He then entered upon a course of sinful behaviour, only to be rebuked by an ungodly woman for cursing. She told him that he “was the ungodliest fellow for swearing that ever she heard in all her life”. This rebuke from such a quarter shamed him and he reformed his life and became proud of the change that had taken place. He forsook dancing and other practices and concluded no one could serve God better. From an outwardly sinful life he now had become self-righteous. His employment took him to Bedford and, passing through the streets, he heard four women sitting in a door talking of their religious exercises. They were speaking about a new birth and the work of God on their hearts and how they had been convinced of their miserable state before the change in their lives. This was so completely new to him that he could not get their words out of his mind and he was irresistibly drawn to their company. The Holy Spirit was in this way carrying out a gracious work.
His mind was turned to the issues of eternity. Following many temptations and questionings about whether he had a real faith and about the doctrine of election, the Bedford tinker was enabled to cast himself as a lost sinner on the Lord Jesus Christ for salvation. The Saviour’s voice in Scripture broke in upon his soul with the words, “Compel them to come in, that my house might be filled,” and, “yet there is room.” As Owen C Watkins has observed regarding Bunyan’s conversion, “There was no single dramatic moment at which he became conscious of his rebirth but from the time when ‘the thoughts of religion were very grievous’ there were four incidents which all had a lasting effect”.6 These were the reading of the two books on practical divinity, the sermon on Sabbath breaking, the rebuke for swearing and his overhearing of the conversation about the work of grace in the soul.
Pieter de Vries, in his sympathetic account of Bunyan’s theology, notes, “The Puritans did not intend the preparation unto the new birth to be an obstacle for coming to Christ, which is not to say that they all escaped this danger. Occasionally, if often unconsciously, this preparation came to function as such. An intense fixation on the work of God in the heart diverted the interest in Christ. For fear of a superficial Christianity, a number of Puritans extensively dwelt on the marks of a sinner coming to Christ. That was the reason they did not always escape the danger of having certain matters precede – if only logically – the implanting in Christ through faith. Continually speaking about the marks of a coming to Christ, they sometimes obstructed the vision of Christ himself.”7 In 1678, over a decade after the first edition of Grace Abounding, Bunyan wrote his treatise, Come and Welcome to Jesus Christ. By then he had become conscious, not only of that danger, but also of the necessity of warning against thinking that all true conversions must follow a similar pattern.
In Come and Welcome to Jesus Christ Bunyan warns, “Thy fears that Christ will not receive thee may arise from thine own folly, in inventing, yea, in thy chalking out to God a way to bring thee home to Jesus Christ. Some souls that are coming to Jesus Christ are great tormentors of themselves upon this account; they conclude that if their coming to Jesus Christ is right, they must needs be brought home thus and thus: as to instance: (1.) Says one, If God be bringing of me to Jesus Christ, then will He load me with the guilt of sin till He makes me roar again. (2.) If God be indeed bringing me home to Jesus Christ, then must I be assaulted with dreadful temptations of the devil. (3.) If God be indeed bringing me to Jesus Christ, then even when I come at Him, I shall have wonderful revelations of Him. . . . God hath more ways than thou knowest of to bring a sinner to Jesus Christ; but He will not give thee beforehand an account by which of them He will bring thee to Christ (Is 40:13, Job 33:13). Sometimes He hath His ways in the whirlwind; but sometimes the Lord is not there (Nah 1:3, 1 Ki 19:11).
“If God will deal more gently with thee than with others of His children, grudge not at it: refuse not the waters that go softly, lest He bring up to thee the waters of the rivers, strong and many, even these two smoking firebrands, the devil and guilt of sin (Is 8:6-7). He saith to Peter, ‘Follow me’: and what thunder did Zaccheus hear or see? ‘Zaccheus, Come down,’ saith Christ; and ‘he came down’, says Luke, ‘and received Him joyfully’. But had Peter or Zaccheus made the objection that thou hast made, and directed the Spirit of the Lord, as thou hast done, they might have looked long enough, before they had found themselves coming to Jesus Christ. Besides, I will tell thee that the greatness of sense of sin, the hideous roaring of the devil, yea, and abundance of revelations, will not prove that God is bringing thy soul to Jesus Christ: as Balaam, Cain, Judas, and others can witness.”8
Bunyan’s Great Trial.
A very significant part of Grace Abounding is taken up with what Bunyan considered the greatest temptation which ever distressed his soul; he believed for a time that he had committed the unforgiveable sin.9 It seems to have occurred shortly after his conversion. Faith is often tried, and after Bunyan had been assured of his interest in Christ, he was assailed again by the devil, whispering to him that he should sell Christ and let go of Him in exchange for the things of this world. He was haunted by this for a whole year and nothing seemed to diminish the power of the temptation.
Whilst he was working, when he was eating, “Sell Him, sell Him, sell Him,” kept ringing in his ears. At first, he resisted: “I will not, I will not, I will not; no, not for a thousand, thousand, thousand worlds”.
Finally, worn out by the struggle he felt the thought pass through his heart, “Let Him go, if He will,” and he thought also that he felt his heart consent to it. At this Bunyan felt a deep despair well up in his heart, and a terrifying storm engulfed him. He considered this to be the heaviest temptation he ever had to bear in all his life. For two long years he saw nothing but judgement and damnation awaiting him. The words of Hebrews 12:16-17, concerning Esau, seized upon his soul, “who for one morsel of meat sold his birthright. For ye know how that afterward, when he would have inherited the blessing, he was rejected: for he found no place of repentance, though he sought it carefully with tears.” Bunyan was to say, “These words were to my soul like fetters of brass to my legs, in the continual sound of which I went for several months together” (s 144).
For two years he had few moments of relief; he trembled at the idea that he might have counted the blood of Christ an unholy thing. He was unable to derive any consolation from the promises of the gospel. Though tempted by Satan that prayer was valueless, he did not give up prayer, and gradually the storm subsided. Whilst in prayer he writes, “That piece of a sentence darted in upon me, ‘My grace is sufficient’. At this methought I felt some stay; as it were there might be hope” (s 204). He would later add, “This scripture did also most sweetly visit my soul”: Christ’s words in John 6:37, “Him that cometh to Me I will in no wise cast out” – in particular the words “in no wise” – were made precious to his soul (s 215).
In retrospect Bunyan was able to say that he had emerged from the trial stronger than when he had entered it. As he was grappling with the question whether Christ could ever be his, any trace of doubt about Christ’s divine nature or the truthfulness of God’s Word had disappeared. The Bible had become a guide for him in every plight and on every issue. The knowledge of his lost state had brought him to a full realisation of the vast riches of God’s promises. Bunyan would later see the advantages he had gained by the temptation. Four stand out:
(1) He was made continually to possess his soul with a wonderful sense of the Being of God and of His beloved Son. He realised he had been assaulted with atheism (s 244).
(2) The Scriptures were now wonderful to him (s 245).
(3) He was enabled to see more of God’s promises than ever he had before and to suck sweetness from them (s 247,248-251).
(4) He testified that never again had he seen such heights and depths of grace, love and mercy as he saw after this temptation. Great sins draw out great grace. He could hardly bear up under the sense of God’s grace (s252).
Grace Abounding concludes with an account of Bunyan’s call to the ministry, the false accusation made against him of immoral conduct, details of his imprisonment and finally with what is termed a “Continuation of Bunyan’s life, beginning where he left off and with the time and manner of his death and burial, together with his true character”.10
John Bunyan’s writings are of great value. It is recorded that King Charles II asked John Owen, the distinguished Puritan theologian and Oxford scholar, how such an educated man as he could sit and listen to John Bunyan, a tinker. Owen replied, “I would willingly exchange my learning for the tinker’s power of touching men’s hearts”.11 It is also indicative of the value placed on Bunyan’s writings in the Free Presbyterian Church that ministerial students are examined on three of Bunyan’s treatises in their Presbytery examinations during their training. The Banner of Truth is to be thanked not only for reprinting the standard three-volume edition of The Works of John Bunyan but also for making available a number of his treatises as single volumes. Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners is the latest, well-produced addition to these individual treatises, which include, The Pilgrims Progress, The Jerusalem Sinner Saved, The Saint’s Knowledge of Christ’s Love (retitled All Loves Excelling), Come and Welcome to Jesus Christ, The Acceptable Sacrifice and his book on Prayer.
1The book being reviewed is Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, by John Bunyan, Banner of Truth Trust, 2018, hardback, 177 pages, £10; it may be obtained from the Free Presbyterian Bookroom.
2Whilst there are many biographies of Bunyan, the five-hundred-page volume by John Brown, minister of the Church at Bunyan Meeting in Bedford, has not been superseded. John Bunyan (1628-1688), His Life, Times and Work, Tercentenary Edition revised by Frank Mott Harrison, London, 1928. The first edition was published in 1885.
3This series of articles by Mr Beaton in The Free Presbyterian Magazine, vol 7, along with a further 13 articles which he wrote in later volumes of the Magazine are an excellent introduction to a some of the finest volumes of Christian literature. The articles are very similar to the series that Principal John Macleod wrote for the Monthly Record of the Free Church of Scotland between 1918 and 1922 and was reprinted as a small volume by the Banner of Truth Trust in 1988, with the title Some Favourite Books.
4Free Presbyterian Magazine, vol 7, p 300 (December 1902).
5Both books have been reprinted by Soli Deo Gloria Publications in America.
6Owen C Watkins, “John Bunyan and His Experience”, in Servants of the Word, Puritan Conference Report 1957, p 37. See also Owen C Watkins, The Puritan Experience, London, 1972, pp 101-120.
7Pieter de Vries, John Bunyan and the Order of Salvation, Peter Lang, 1994, p 142.
8The Complete Works of John Bunyan, National Foundation for Christian Education, vol 2, 1968, p 231. This edition of Bunyan’s Works is a reprint in three volumes of the four-volume edition edited by Henry Stebbing.
9The account of this severe trial covers just over a quarter of Grace Abounding: sections 133-252. In this review article, citations to Grace Abounding are given by section number rather than page number in order to make the reference applicable to any edition of the book.
10Roger Sharrock in the introduction to the Oxford University Press edition of Grace Abounding (1962) says the author of the “Continuation” was reputed to be George Cokayne, an ejected minister and a ministerial colleague of Bunyan. But as Sharrock points out, this has been challenged and the identity of the author is not certain (p xiii and note 1).
11John Brown, John Bunyan, His Life, Times and Work, p 366.