One of the great preachers
of the nineteenth century was a Scotsman named, George Matheson (1842-1906). As
a young man Matheson had his sights set on becoming a lawyer. Because of
degenerating eyesight, he wore thick lenses through school, but by the age of
eighteen he was practically blind. He identified with Paul’s suffering and
prayed for his “thorn in the flesh” to be removed (2 Cor. 12:7), but it never
was. He once described his plight as “a life which has beaten persistently
against the cage of circumstances.”
Unable to become a lawyer,
Matheson decided to become a preacher. However, while he was studying for the
ministry his faith was shaken by the onset of German philosophers like Kant and
Hegel which undermined Christianity. Then Darwin’s theory of evolution gained
traction and seemed to destroy the need for a Creator. Matheson had just become
a clergyman when he said, “with a great thrill of horror, I found myself an
absolute atheist. I believed nothing, neither God nor immortality.”
At the same time,
heartbreak was added to his mounting doubts. While in school, a twenty-year-old
Matheson fell in love and was soon engaged to be married. When he broke the
news to his fiancée that he was losing his eyesight, she decided she could not
go through life with a blind husband. She left him. Matheson was utterly devastated
having been rejected by the love of his youth.[1]
George Matheson
In spite of his blindness
and his intellectual doubts, Matheson could not shake one reality that he knew
to be true—God’s love for him which was manifested by Christ’s sacrifice on the
cross. It was in that pit of despondency in 1882 that God spoke to Matheson
like never before and he was inspired to write a hymn that has blessed so many.
[2]
O Love that wilt not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in thee;
I give thee back the life I owe,
That in thine ocean depths its flow
May richer, fuller be.
In the darkness of that
moment George Matheson wrote this hymn. He remarked afterward that it took him
five minutes and that it was the only hymn he ever wrote that required no
editing. Though Matheson was physically blind, his spiritual vision was 20/20.
He learned to live in the assurance of those glorious words penned by Paul in Romans
8:35-38:
35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?
Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or
peril, or sword? . . . 38 For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor
angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, 39
nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us
from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
-DM
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