Light for them that sit in Darkness

A week already gone by?! See the post by Ludvig, my esteemed colleague to find out what really happened this week. What I give you now is a book report that I wrote this afternoon for Church book reports tomorrow. The book is very keenly recommended, one of my favs.

Book Report: Light for Them that Sit in Darkness

This book that I'm sharing is John Bunyan's Light for Them that Sit in Darkness. It's author is famous for Pilgrim's Progress, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, and many other masterpieces of Christian literature. God brought this book into my life during a time of real struggle - I took one look at the title and thought "This one's for me".

This book was written in I674, three years after Bunyan's release from prison where he had been kept for 12 years. The subtitle is (and you'll have to pardon my reading, some of his sentences are pretty long): "A discourse to show how Jesus Christ undertook to accomplish by Himself the eternal redemption of sinners". In the Editor's forward, they said that Bunyan was concerned with some grave errors of his day. There were those who believed that the Bible was of no importance and a person's own inner light was the essential guide for salvation. Bunyan published his book to show that the light of the Word would reveal the truth about Christ, the only means of salvation. And so all throughout his book, it is just riddled with scripture references (on one page I counted 11) worked right into Bunyan's sentences.

"Alas!" said Bunyan in his preface, "How ordinary a thing is it for professors to fall from the knowledge they have had of the glorious gospel of the blessed God, and to be turned unto fables, seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils..." He was convinced that the cause of this trouble was that people did not have or retain knowledge of Christ's Person, or did not know "the reason of His coming, doing, and suffering".

And so expounding this theme, Bunyan starts at the beginning with the promises about Christ and how perfectly he fulfilled them. Taking a verse from Acts 8:13, he asks "What is this Jesus?" or in modern speech "Who is he?" "What was it for him to be of the seed of David?" And what about his being that seed according to the promise? etc.

Next he has two "observations" (there are no chapters in this book, they're in big brackets called "Observation First" and "Observation Second" but it's just wonderful stuff!). Just the title of the first one is "That in all ages, God gave His people a promise and so ground for a believing remembrance that He would one day send them a Savior". He expounds that a while, then moves to the second observation. Then he has another big clause about how Christ addressed himself to the work of redemption by "taking on our flesh", and "being made under the law". And on it goes.

It's a very earnest book. It is, as I said before, reasoned and hugely supported by the Scriptures, and it is a very faithful and refreshing dealing about our Lord.