The Sovereignty of God

In Isaiah 6 Isaiah does not argue with the Lord. He does not think that he knows better. He is willing to humbly and trustingly obey whatever the Lord says. If it is God's will to ruin and depopulate cities, to leave houses ... deserted … fields ruined and ravaged and send the people into exile and more – Isaiah will still go in obedience to his Lord and Master.

This is the spirit seen in some of the finest missionaries the church has known. Henry Martyn, the brilliant Cambridge student from Cornwall, is rightly famous as the young man who in the 19th century went out to India and Persia with the gospel and died before doing half that he intended. He is said to have seen only one convert. But he believed in the sovereignty of God. He once wrote home in a letter “If we labour to the end of our days without seeing one convert, it shall not be worse for us in time, and our reward is the same in eternity. The cause in which we are engaged is the cause of mercy and truth, and therefore in spite of seeming impossibilities it must eventually prevail.”

Lord Ion Keith Falconer is another lesser known missionary, who lived a little later than Martyn and worked in Aden in the Yemen. Another gifted young man, brilliant in Arabic, he went out preaching the gospel but seemingly with little or no success. Yet some years later another missionary in Aden could write

“During the years since the mission was started there have been very few converts, but there have been some. Work among Muslims is very hard, ... but the work goes on, and the endeavour is made to win the people for Christ. All this work is directly due to the self-sacrificing labour of Ion Keith-Falconer, who is still remembered by some of the older people, who when they were boys were accustomed to receive sweets from him. His name is commemorated in the title of the mission, which is called the Keith-Falconer Mission and in that of the United Free Church at Steamer Point called the Keith-Falconer Memorial Church. … (and here speaks a man who clearly believes in the sovereignty of God) … One happy day, Mohammad's Crescent will yield and disappear before Christ's Cross; and, when this day dawns, the young scholar, whose torch seemed to be stifled and extinguished far too speedily among the Arabian sands, will be counted among those who have brought about the glad consummation.”