Abraham
Lincoln’s Freeing Encounter with Christ
By Rev. Dr.
Ed & Janice Hird
-previously published in the June 2023 Light Magazine
At Mount
Rushmore, Abraham Lincoln’s face is chiseled into the rockface. Leo Tolstoy called him “a Christ in
miniature, a saint of humanity.” Historian David S. Reynolds remarked there
was only one historical figure, Jesus Christ, with more books written about him
than Lincoln. Why
have more than 14,000 books been written about Abraham Lincoln since his death
in 1865?
As a young man,
Lincoln was soundly defeated politically when first campaigning for the
Illinois Legislature. After his General
Store business failed, Honest Abe spent seventeen years paying off the debts of
his shady business partner. After
becoming engaged to Ann Rutledge, she tragically died of typhoid. He later
married Mary Todd who encouraged his political future. While running for the
United States Senate in 1858, he was badly defeated. Because he was so deeply honest, however, his
very failures advanced him, preparing him for his greatest appointment: –freeing
the slaves and saving the Union. Abraham Lincoln is one of the world’s most
successful failures. Dr. E. Stanley
Jones said that we can look to Lincoln as an example that our failures in
Christ can lay the foundation for ultimate success.
At six feet
four inches, Lincoln towered above most men, who in the 1860s averaged five
feet seven inches. As a rural Westerner,
he was initially mocked for his lack of urban sophistication, but ultimately
became loved just like Benjamin Franklin, as a man of the common people. Lincoln is the only American President who received
a patent (1849) for his invention. It
allowed steamships to cross through shallow waters.
He was a self-deprecating
humorous story teller who, when President, wrote his own speeches. Loving music,
poetry, and drama, he was able to recite long stanzas and passages from memory.
Raised in a hard-shell
Calvinist Baptist home in Kentucky, Lincoln was drawn by his mother’s gentle
faith and repelled by his father’s angry religiosity. His illiterate dad who worshipped hard work
did not understand why his son wasted so much time thinking and reading. If his
father caught him reading books aloud to other farm workers, he would sometimes
rip up his books and even whip him.
Abraham’s mother,
Nancy, died in 1818 from poisoned milk when he was only nine. His father Thomas abandoned his children for
seven months in their floorless Kentucky cabin without a door. Lincoln described this area as ‘a wild
region’ where ‘the panther’s scream filled the night with fear and bears preyed
on the swine.’ When Abraham’s new
stepmother, Sarah, arrived with his father, she discovered the children living
like animals – ‘wild –ragged and dirty.’
The father-wound in Lincoln was very deep, affecting him spiritually and
emotionally. It is no wonder that Lincoln sometimes struggled with sadness, depression
and suicidal thoughts.
Amazingly, Lincoln, who only had one year of school,
became a self-taught lawyer. Influenced
by reading deist Thomas Paine’s book The Age of Reason, he became more
skeptical. When questioned however, he said:
…I have never denied the truth of the Scriptures; and I have never
spoken with intentional disrespect of religion in general, or of any
denomination of Christians in particular.
Through great
suffering and the loss of his son Willie from typhoid, Lincoln later softened
towards the gospel. He once said to
Rebecca Pomroy, Willie’s nurse: “I wish I had that child-like faith you speak
of, and I trust He will give it to me.”
E. Stanley Jones recounts how Rev. James F. Jacques, Colonel of the
Illinois 73rd ‘Preachers’ Regiment, and Lincoln first met in 1846
while circuit riding in Illinois. Jacques was a circuit preacher, and Lincoln was
a circuit lawyer. Lincoln admired Jacques’
level-headedness and integrity. Jacques
was later entrusted by Lincoln with a confidential mission to meet the
Confederate President Jefferson Davis.
After hearing Jacques preach one Sunday on the new birth, Lincoln visited
him a few days later, spending hours talking and praying together. Jacques
said: “I have seen hundreds brought to Christ, and if ever a person was
converted, Abraham Lincoln was converted that night in my house.”
Because
Lincoln’s wife was Presbyterian, he began attending a Presbyterian church in
1850. During his Presidency (1860 to 1865), he and his family regularly
attended New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, DC. Dr Phineas
Gurley, their pastor, who ministered to the Lincoln family in their many
griefs, was given Lincoln’s tall hat as an expression of gratitude. Dr. Gurley
served as Lincoln’s personal advisor in the appointment of trustworthy military
chaplains.
A man arrived
fifteen minutes early for an five a.m. appointment to meet Abraham Lincoln.
Hearing a voice in the next room, the man asked the attendant: “Who is in the
next room? Someone with the President?” “No, he is reading the Bible and
praying.” “Is that his habit so early in the morning?” “Yes, sir, he spends
each morning from four to five in reading the Scriptures and praying.” Dr. E.
Stanley Jones commented: “No wonder we cannot forget Lincoln. He is perennially
fresh with God.”
There may be
no other American President who quoted the Bible as often as Abraham Lincoln. Who
can forget his citing Mark 3:25 “A house divided against itself cannot stand”,
after which he said: “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half
slave and half free.” In his surviving letters, he mentions God more than 420
times, most often quoting passages from the Old Testament. It is no wonder that many rabbis saw Lincoln
as a new Moses.
In the
Gettysburg Address of only 700 words, Lincoln referred to God or the Almighty
eight times and liberally quoted and paraphrased the Bible. His Gettysburg Address
prayer was that “this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom.” Lincoln’s personal Bible is notably dog-eared
and heavily underlined.
In his four-year
wartime presidency, Lincoln again and again faced impossible, heart-wrenching
dilemmas. Over 750,000 people were killed in the Civil War, 2 ½ percent of the
population and 25% of the soldiers. Lincoln
said, “I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction
that I had nowhere to go; my own conviction and that of those around me seemed
insufficient for the day.” Lincoln twice called for a day of humiliation,
fasting and prayer in 1861 and 1863. He
publicly wondered if the prolonged Civil War was God’s judgement on the USA for
exploiting the slaves. Then he called for “malice towards none, and charity to
all.”
Many see
Lincoln as an American William Wilberforce.
He had faith that right makes might. He insightfully realized that “in
giving freedom to the slaves, we assure freedom to the free.” Lincoln, the
Great Emancipator, went through many conversions in his life, including
prioritizing the freeing of the four million slaves. In 1858, Lincoln tried to prevent slavery’s
spread to the western territories, saying, “I have always hated slavery I think
as much as any Abolitionist.” Six years
later, he said “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I cannot remember
when I did not so think and feel.” Lincoln, upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe,
author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, said, “So you’re the little woman who wrote
the book that made this great war.” By the end of the civil war, almost 200,000
freed slaves had joined the Union Army.
While Canada
was officially neutral in the American Civil War, 50,000 Canadians fought
mostly for the Union, with 7,000 giving their lives. Calixa Lavallée, who wrote the music for “O
Canada,” was wounded at Antietam as a Union Army musician.
On the last
day of his life, Lincoln told his wife that after the civil war, he wanted to visit
Jerusalem, to walk in the Saviour’s footsteps. John Wilkes Booth assassinated Lincoln
on Good Friday 1865. Booth was furious
over Lincoln’s plans to extend the vote to literate blacks and all black military
veterans. Frederick Douglass, the most prominent black leader, initially
chastised Lincoln as a pro-slavery wolf in anti-slavery sheep’s clothing. Later
in 1865, he described Lincoln as “emphatically the black man’s president, the
first to show any respect for their rights as men.” Seventy years later, Martin
Luther King Jr. stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington,
proclaiming his dream that one day the nation would live out the freedom and
equality, envisioned by Douglass and Lincoln.
Let the freedom that Lincoln experienced and believed in, reign in 2023.
Rev. Dr. Ed & Janice Hird, co-authors, God's Firestarters
