Thomas Brooks is today one of the better-known Puritans, because of his writings (six substantial volumes, in the nineteenth-century edition, which the Banner of Truth has reprinted). But little is known about his life. He was born in 1608 and was licensed to preach the gospel in 1640. Before being licensed, he seems to have been some years at sea, possibly as a chaplain. He became a minister in London, but was ejected from his charge in 1662 after the passing of the Act of Uniformity. Yet he seems to have been able to continue preaching within the bounds of his parish. He died in 1680. C H Spurgeon wrote that “he was head and shoulders above all the people . . . in mind and soul and grace”.1
In one of his books, Brooks wrote, “As there are no mercies equal to spiritual mercies, so there are no judgements equal to spiritual judgements”.2 Brooks lived through the English Civil War, and surely a civil war is one of the worst temporal judgements that can befall a nation. It involves such killing and suffering and enmity among people who, even if they had not actually been friends, may at least have been conscious of the bond of unity resulting from belonging to the same country.
But Brooks also experienced the Great Ejection, when close on 2000 ministers were forbidden to preach. It was an act of persecution on the part of the civil and ecclesiastical authorities but, as far as the nation and its people were concerned, it was a judgement from God – a spiritual judgement. And it was one of the most serious of judgements because many people throughout England – and the situation in Scotland was similar – were no longer able to hear scriptural preaching. A few godly preachers did remain in the Church of England, and many who had been ejected did what they could to minister to the spiritual needs of their flocks. We might think of these things as, especially, God’s judgement on the many who did not value their opportunities when the pure gospel was set before them, who continued in unbelief – and then their opportunities were withdrawn.
1Brooks, Smooth Stones Taken From Ancient Brooks: Selections From the Writings of Thomas Brooks by C H Spurgeon, Banner of Truth Trust, 2021 reprint, p v.
2Brooks, Smooth Stones, p 23.
Temporal judgements affect people in this life, often very severely indeed, but spiritual judgements have serious implications also for eternity. When God abandons a people or an individual to their own spiritual thinking, or to the entire absence of biblical thinking, they are being left on the way to a lost eternity, and no other judgement can be as awful as that.
The United Kingdom, though it has been spared civil war for most of 300 years, has experienced many judgements, including her involvement in two world wars during the last 120 years. Today, economic prospects are darker than they have been for many years, and that has implications for many aspects of life. And among the other temporal judgements that this and other nations have experienced in the recent past has been the Covid pandemic. But far more serious is the religious situation in such countries as Britain; we are in the midst of a severe spiritual judgement. Yet how few are conscious of the severity of our situation!
Long ago, the Prophet Amos spoke of the Lord sending “a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord” (8:11). Today there is no shortage of God’s Word in printed form; it can be bought on many high streets and shopping centres, for instance, in the United Kingdom. What is lacking is the will to read the Scriptures, to “hear what God the Lord will speak” (Ps 85:8). It is a great mercy when God makes a sinner willing to search the Scriptures, to discover what God’s message is to him or her in particular, and the absence of God’s activity in making sinners willing to search out God’s revelation is itself a judgement on the rebellious attitudes that are so common today.
But Amos used the word hearing rather than reading. And while a Bible may be easily obtained, the preaching of the Word, in any degree of purity, is often much more difficult to find; many of the candlesticks which once shone brightly in so many British communities have been removed, as happened in Ephesus (see Rev 2:5). For God to remove the preaching of law and gospel from a town or a village is a very serious matter, a judgement following the unwillingness of the local people to take to heart the great privilege of being called to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ as the Saviour whom God has given for the salvation of sinners.
There is a widespread resistance today to the authority of God and to the revelation He has given, a resistance that has its root in hardness of heart. God is very largely leaving sinners to themselves, in His judgement on this generation. He spoke of blessing the Jews after their captivity in Babylon by taking away the stony heart out of their flesh and giving them instead a heart of flesh (Ezek 36:26). No impression can be made on a heart of stone; it is entirely impossible for it to receive any spiritual impression. No matter how
powerfully a preacher might proclaim the Word of God, no impression will be made on hardhearted sinners apart from the accompanying influence of God’s Spirit – unless the Spirit will renew their hearts, making those sinners spiritually alive, so that they are able to repent and believe the gospel.
But the Holy Spirit has been very largely withdrawn. He is not, on any large scale, convincing sinners of God’s existence; He is leaving them, for instance, to the influence of the theory of evolution, which naturally leads most of those who accept it to deny that God exists.3 Yet for many more, the prevailing motivation for their ungodliness is the philosophy, “Let us eat and drink; for tomorrow we shall die” (Is 22:13). They live for the here and now, without any regard to spiritual realities or to the eternity into which they must inevitably enter. This is the way of life to which God has abandoned so many in this generation.
Yet David could say, “Thou, O Lord, art a God full of compassion” (Ps 86:15). Being full of compassion, God is able to look on the needs of sinners, and of a whole generation of sinners, with a view to providing for them spiritually, to bring them in contact with spiritual truth, to bless the truth to them by the Holy Spirit, to take away their hardness and their rejection of Him. How much we need to pray, “Wilt Thou not revive us again?” (Ps 85:6). The Lord is the living God, who is able to fulfill all His purposes. He can give life to dead souls, even as the Saviour told the people of His time: “God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham” (Mt 3:9) – to make spiritually dead sinners into true believers.
If God will in mercy powerfully revive His Church in this world through the widespread, effectual working of His Spirit, there will be many who will be described as the Welsh preacher Thomas Charles (1755-1814) was described: “When he speaks of God, he does so like one who has seen Him who is invisible. When he describes the deceitfulness of the heart and the evil of sin, he does so as one who had known both [these matters] by sad experience, and had found how injurious they are and what misery they bring. When again he delineates the glory and sufficiency of the Saviour, and the value of His word, he does so as one who had seen His glory, experienced His sufficiency, and found how precious He is.”4 When many such people are raised up – in particular, preachers of the gospel, Brooks’ words will be proved true: “There are no mercies equal to spiritual mercies”.
3Some do believe in theistic evolution, which claims that God brought everything into existence by a process of evolution. However, the Bible clearly points to God as the Creator, who made all things in six actual days, not by billions of years of evolution. It is “through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God” (Heb 11:3).
4The words of Edward Morgan, quoted in John Aaron, Thomas Charles of Bala, Banner of Truth, 2022, p 337.